


The Lies of Garden

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Female Doctor Experiments [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, This is another experiment, Unfinished, Unless I strip the serial numbers off and make an original work of it, a long one, not likely to be finished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 06:59:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17361191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: This is another sample of me writing a female Doctor by swapping pronouns.  The plot is classic teen dystopia stuff.  The purpose was to see how a rude and somewhat unsympathetic Doctor came across when she was a woman.  I also swapped the companion to male just to see how it worked.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oooookay. This story. This story has a bit of a history behind it.
> 
> Some years ago, I tried writing a classic teen dystopia. I shelved it. Lost momentum.
> 
> About a year after that, I pulled it out of storage and tried rewriting it as a _Doctor Who_ story, using the prickliest Doctor I could think of: Six. I needed someone who would plausibly think of quitting, and I thought that Six, after Trial of a Time Lord, was a distinct possibility. I planned to write the whole story and then rewrite it into original work and send it off somewhere.
> 
> So what happened? _The damn COAT became a plot point,_ that's what happened. I shelved it.
> 
> Then I decided I wanted to explore all aspects of the Doctor, including prickliness and unlikeability, as see how they fit with being a woman. This story naturally occurred to me, and I decided to do a pronoun swap and see how things worked out.
> 
> I know the plot—with the Doctor spending a long time trying to dodge _being_ the Doctor—is not the sort of thing you'd ever want to try with the first female Doctor. But I wanted to see if it might work for, say, the sixth one. All in all, I'm not entirely sure, but the dystopia is good, proper _Doctor Who._

Where Callion sat, the end-of-shift horn was loud enough to be painful. It was still the most welcome sound of the day.

Orran, the old man who worked next to Callion, said, "Well, time to go," in the exact same intonation that he used every day. Callion ignored him. Orran was less than fifty, but he'd become an old man all the same; his mind was too rigid for anyone to have a real conversation with him. Callion put the rolling machine in standby, a procedure so automatic that he couldn't explain it without moving his hands and visualizing the switches. His ID popped out of the little slot on the side. He grabbed it, stood up, and fell into line behind the other first shift workers.

Callion was fourteen, one of the youngest people at the cigarette factory. He'd been dismissed from school at twelve for lack of aptitude, which wasn't that uncommon. Not many people made it through all ten years. But most of the dismissals from Callion's class had ended up at water-processing or the farms. He still wasn't sure why admin had sent him to cigarettes—admin never explained anything—but rumor said only the dullest people got assigned here.

It didn't bother most of the first shift. They thought water-processing workers were puffed up and self-important. Ahead of him, Callion could hear Sapell and Norrem talking about where they would go to drink, which was what the two older boys spent most of their conversation on. Sapell was eighteen, Norrem was nineteen, and they spent their nights meeting girls in bars—usually without circulation passes. They were very open about their rule-breaking, too. Sapell, who was quite nice to Callion, had once rattled off a list of the best complexes to drink in, explained how to muddle the ID-scanner so that it thought you belonged, and offered to teach Callion how to flirt.

Callion had thanked him sincerely and declined. Sapell had been a bit cool to him ever since, which Callion regretted. It wasn't that he disliked the boy. They just had nothing in common—and besides, Callion had a secret these days.

Outside the factory, he split off from the others and went down the right-hand tunnel. He lived at the very end of Complex 413, a run-down sort of neighborhood where you had to slip maintenance an extra pack of smokes if you wanted your lights changed and the air smelled permanently of mildew. Callion had always objected to the bribery, but it was only in the last twenty days that he had noticed the smell.

He didn't go straight home. Instead, he ducked into the tunnel that ran between 413-46 and 413-47.

The light in here had a permanent flicker. There was nothing in the tunnel besides trash, some of it in cans, some of it lying on the floor. The ceiling was even lower than normal, and 413 didn't have a high ceiling even in the commons—of course, the commons was barely worthy of the name, with a single sad tetherball for the younger inhabitants and two of those plastic things that were supposed to look like plants but, according to the farm workers, didn't. There was a door at the end of this alley that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY - VIOLATORS WILL BE PUNISHED!

Most people would never have touched it. Which was why most people would never have discovered that the lock didn't work anymore.

Callion looked behind himself before slipping through. He wasn't sure if he needed to or not. Divon, who had lived near the dorm where Callion grew up, used to rant about admin having cameras everywhere and making people disappear in the middle of the night. Divon had also been close to fifty and generally acknowledged to be a little on the blink. Certainly Callion had never seen a sign of the nightmarish efficiency Divon ranted about. If admin took fifty days to process a shift change request—and they did—they probably didn't have a Warren-wide spy network. And if they didn't disappear Sapell and Norrem for drinking outside their complex . . .

Except that what Callion was doing was different from drinking at the wrong bar. He wasn't sure how he knew—it was nowhere in the rules, it was nothing that anyone ever told him—but it was viscerally true.

The first time he had gone through the door, he had stared at the shaft and the ladder for half a minute, then retreated back through the door, breathing hard as if he'd been running.  
He knew what the shaft was, of course. It was part of the ventilation system. And it was obvious where the ladder went; it had to lead up to the surface. The ladder's end hung some three meters above his head, and Callion wasn't sure why it had a rope attached to the bottom rung to pull it down when it was clearly supposed to be operated by ID card. But that was a minor enigma. The big mystery—the inexplicable, impossible one—was why anyone would want to go to the surface.

After chewing on it for ten days or so, Callion decided that he had to find out. There was a reason, he acknowledged ruefully, that the school had judged him irredeemably stupid, and this incurable, poking-at-things irrationality was part of it.

He'd first climbed the ladder twenty days ago. It took him far longer than he’d thought, and made his arms far sorer than they'd ever been. The shaft was dimly lit, with several thumping fans along its length; Callion was skinny enough to get by them with ease, but the air buffeted his clothes. After what must have been ten levels, the shaft ended in a tiny room.

It was only the shaky pain in Callion's arms that stopped him from changing his mind and racing back down again. The tiny room had a grille set in one side, and there was light coming through the grille. And the light had a quality that Callion had never seen before, a color and an intensity.

Outside light.

Peeking through the grille revealed—Callion wasn't sure what. Blocks. Structures. Buildings, Callion supposed; in the Warren, you never got to see the outside of anything. Most of them were falling down, which made sense.

The fascinating thing—the thing that held him there—was the color. The light had a weird, painting effect on everything, giving it a vivid orangey overlay. It made the ruined buildings cast impossibly sharp shadows, making them look somehow realer than anything in the Warren. There was something near the grille, something small, something it took Callion a bit of bobbing and squinting to make out; at length, he decided it was some sort of plant. At least, it was green, and had things that were probably supposed to be leaves, and the little yellow puff was probably supposed to be a flower—

Except, since this was outside, it wasn't supposed to be a flower, it _was_ a flower. The plastic plants were the imitations. It felt like a dizzying, upside down way to view the world.

He looked out for more than half an hour. He saw some roaches, which were no different from the ones he squashed in his living quarters. He noticed after a while that the light was changing, deepening, and studied the colors and shadows it produced with wonderment. What he didn't see were Deathdealers.

After a while, he got hungry and climbed back down.

The second time he climbed up, he decided to try the room's door. There was no way it would open, after all. No-one would be stupid enough to leave a door to the surface unlocked—

It was unlocked.

The first moments, standing there, were almost enough to make him give up on the whole project for good. _There was no roof._ The world went up forever, just like the stories said, and for the first time, Callion knew what color infinity was: pale blue. He felt as if he were going to tumble out into it—thought what it would mean to fall and fall and never hit anything—and lunged back into the room, shutting the door behind himself and gripping the knob so tightly his fingers hurt. He considered lighting a cigarette, but abandoned the notion after seeing how badly his hands were shaking.

Of course, no-one could fall up. Not even on the surface. That was what made it up.

He really didn't have anything to be afraid of—except for Deathdealers, of course, and the surface being a desolate wasteland where no-one could live—but he hadn't seen any Deathdealers in his short glimpse, had he?

No. He hadn't.

And the colors really were extraordinary. He'd seen something in the infinite blue, Callion recalled—pinkish brushstrokes, he would have said, except according to everything he'd heard, there was nothing for them to be painted on. He'd never seen a color quite like that. The supposedly soothing pink of medical coveralls would look nasty and grubby next to the luminosity of the—somethings.

And he had a better view through the door than he did through the grille.

He was, Callion realized, trying to talk himself into opening the door again. So, at length, he did.

He stayed there in the doorway, watching, until very near lights-out, or whatever you called it on the surface. Callion knew that the brilliant light had to be Yunestar, also called the Sun, but no-one had ever described the fantastic outflow of color it made when it meandered out of sight. It was a slow process, too, entirely unlike lights-out in a dorm. The sun left a fading afterglow.

He saw a distant spark, like a white light on a control panel, in the dimming emptiness. It had to be a star, Callion thought. He'd always got the impression there were more of them. But it was past time for supper and the heating seemed to cut out with the lights—Callion wasn't clear on how the outside was heated, but he could feel the difference. He decided to go back down.

The next evening, he ventured outside the door. He had a moment of terror when it shut behind him, but it proved easy enough to open again. The locking mechanism had been permanently ruined, probably by the same person who put the rope on the ladder.

In a few days, he got comfortable enough to consider himself a surface veteran. Now, after twenty days, he'd started to explore.

He knew the rhythms of the surface, now—some of them, at least. He had no way of knowing what happened when he was working. But he'd seen lights-out several times—he never got tired of watching it—and braved full night long enough to see a huge quantity of stars. (No Deathdealers fell from them to slaughter him, either.) He'd watched the plant behind the ventilation building lose its yellow flower and develop a white puffy one, which was gradually shredded by the breeze. He wasn't certain of the purpose for this change—the white flower was far too delicate—but he still found it remarkable. He watched the void turn ominous gray, one day, and then he watched water fall out of it from so high up that it shattered and bounced on impact.

Downhill from the ventilation building, about the length of three complexes, there was— _puddle_ was the only word Callion had for it, and it was desperately inadequate. It was a rivulet more than five times the size of a main thoroughfare. It was so big that the people who'd lived on the surface had built some sort of structure to get across it, and the remnants still stood. At the same time, it wasn't a violent gush of water like a leaky pipe. It sat there, placid enough that it took Callion some time to realize that it was actually moving. It seemed to proceed generally in one direction, which Callion established by dangling the hem of his coveralls in the water to see which way they were pushed.

It was almost as if there was some sort of outflow pump in that direction. Possibly it even led to water processing in the Warren. So, feeling quite cheerful despite knowing it was another manifestation of his invincible stupidity, Callion set out downstream to find out if he was right. And that was when he saw the stranger.

\----------

The surface was a quiet place. All Callion had ever heard up here was the constant rustle of circulating air, the soft wet sound of waves, and the occasional sharp skitter that implied rats, although he never saw them. So when something beyond the nearest ruin made a loud, echoing clong, Callion felt his heart try to leap out his mouth. For an instant, he was certain that he was surrounded by Deathdealers.

The sound didn't repeat, and nothing jumped out to annihilate him. After a long moment, Callion edged around the ruin, ready to turn and flee at the slightest provocation. When he made it to the corner, it took some willpower to poke his head around and have a look.

Then he stopped and stared. It wasn't a Deathdealer after all. It was a woman.

Callion had never seen anyone quite like her. She wasn't wearing coveralls, for a start, nor a prof or admin uniform. She was dressed in—Callion didn't even know. It was _lots of different colors,_ for a start, blue and yellow and white, all in patterns. Shocking, even indecent; how was anyone supposed to know where she _worked_ if she was wearing the colors for half the jobs?

And besides, the clothes weren't even a proper coverall. Callion was fairly sure the—top layer, whatever you called it—was in violation of Safety, hanging down loose like that.  
She was a fairly tall woman, with dark tan skin and black, unusually straight hair. Callion, like a great many people in the Warren, had tight-curling hair—colorless, near-white, the kind of hair that went with very pale skin—but he wore it cut very close to his scalp, far too short to get caught in machinery. This woman’s hair was at the very edge of regulation length.  
She seemed more than strong enough to prise rusted locks off metal doors with a sort of metal bar, which was what she was doing. The building's sign proclaimed it to be _Menjavere Shores Secure InfoStorage;_ the only word that made any sense to Callion was _secure,_ and he wasn't sure what it meant in conjunction with the others. As he watched, the padlock gave way. The woman let out a loud, "Hah!" and lock bits pinged and rolled everywhere.

Callion pulled his head back in case she noticed him. A moment later, there was an incredible metallic screech from the door. When he peered around the corner again, the door was open and the woman had vanished inside the building.

Callion wasn't quite adventurous enough to follow her. Neither of them were supposed to be here, and if the woman decided Callion was going to spill her secret—no, better to leave her alone. Callion crept back the way he'd come.

He saw her the next day, strolling through the ruins with her hands in—well, they had to be pockets, he supposed, but Callion had never heard of clothes that had pockets beyond the usual breast-pocket for cigarettes and ID. He wondered why no-one had thought of adding extra pockets before. He also wondered how the woman could possibly be so—not just casual, but fearless.

Callion recoiled back around the corner the moment he spotted the woman, and for a few moments, he was convinced he was too late. The woman must have seen him. She had been walking towards him, after all. Any minute now, she'd give chase, and catch him, and then—

Then what?

That was when Callion heard a peculiar high-pitched noise from around the building, and, hesitantly, had a look.

The woman didn't have any sort of machine that he could see, but she was definitely making the noise. And looking away from Callion, now, fiddling with an abandoned machine in a way that reminded Callion of a factory worker trying to stretch their smoke break. Callion watched the woman for a long moment, but he couldn't work out what she was doing, or even how she was making the noise. It wasn't singing.

The tune sounded a little bit like a rhyme he'd learned back in the dorm. He caught himself singing it to himself as he descended the ladder that night. _"Admin—decide what's good for you! Profs have—too many things to do. Soldiers—don't get their nights off free, so I guess facwork's—the right work—for me."_ Silly ditty, really.

He hadn't thought of songs in the longest time. Part of growing up, Callion supposed; he'd never known an adult to sing. Much less mess around with plastic piping and get it to make noise, which he'd done when he was younger. The kids had called the things tootles. His dorm-father had claimed they were headaches in solid form, and confiscated them whenever he heard them.

It was three days before Callion saw the colorful woman again. Callion kept finding traces of her, including a very large sandwich that hadn't even been touched, sitting precisely in the middle of a piece of paper. The top bun had small, white—somethings on it. Callion didn't take it.

When he finally saw the woman, it was down by the flowing puddle. Callion caught a glimpse of her from a distance and followed her, darting around buildings and hiding behind machinery. When he caught up, the woman was standing at the edge of the waterflow, so close that the ripples touched her shoes. For a while, she just stared out across it. This time Callion hid behind a broken cart-machine, which had apparently plowed into a concrete pole. He was at an angle where he could see the woman’s face, at least in profile.  
For a moment, as she looked upward, Callion thought she looked very sad and discouraged. He could easily imagine that she'd been out here since before the Deathdealers came, that she had somehow missed humanity's evacuation to the Warren—and once the Warren was established, who would dare come back to the surface to get her? Perhaps she had lived here for years, never seeing another soul, thinking herself the very last person in the world—a noble, slightly mad figure, roaming the desolate wilderness, exploring because it was either that or give up and die—

Except that was silly. First, it wasn't possible to survive on the surface. Second, humanity had lived in the Warren for decades. She would have to be well over fifty. Probably over a hundred.

She produced another one of those sandwiches from a pocket, took a bite, and then put it down on the rocks next to herself. Then, as Callion watched, she picked up a flat stone and threw it at the water with a precise flick of her wrist. It skimmed along the surface of the water, struck, and bounced.

And bounced again. Callion's jaw dropped. He hadn't known anything could bounce off water once, let alone twice—thrice—four times—

He counted. The rock skipped off the water five times before finally sinking.

The woman allowed herself a ghost of a smile, then picked up another stone and did it again, for another five hops.

It seemed like she repeated the exercise for several minutes, but it was probably only one or two. At length she straightened up and walked away down the edge of the water. Away from Callion. Leaving the rest of her sandwich untouched.

When Callion was sure the woman was gone, he went to the water's edge, picked up a stone, and tossed it at the water. It sank.

He experimented until the sun disappeared, with a dismaying lack of result. If he used an especially small, flat rock, and if he threw it in a twirly way, keeping it as level as he could, he could make it hop once—sometimes. After long practice, he got two hops, but he couldn't replicate the feat. The way the woman had done it, it looked as if rocks naturally bounced five times before they came to rest. No more, no less.

Callion wondered what the trick was. He leaned back against one of the posts and lit up a cigarette. Perhaps, if he saw the woman again, he could come out into the open and ask her.

When he thought about it, there wasn't any reason to keep hiding from her. The woman wasn't a Deathdealer. She didn't seem to be doing anything violent. She was breaking the rules by being up here, but so was Callion. And so were Sapell and Norrem, barhopping without circulation passes, and the 413 maintenance man with his system of "little extras" for doing his job, and every under-age smoker in the Warren. Which was most of the older children in the Warren; when Callion first lit up at age eleven, his friends had teased him unmercifully about being a late bloomer.

Of course, there were rules and there were rules.

Callion looked around and shivered abruptly. He'd started feeling safe on the surface, almost enough to forget how bizarre and desolate it was. No people, no comforting hum of voices through the walls—no walls, for that matter—no hope or help if something happened to him. The void above went all the way out to the stars, and Callion was suddenly struck by the thought that things up there could look all the way down here just as easily as he could look up. The purple half-light that followed the sun seemed impossibly cold and eerie, and he was suddenly aware of exactly how far he was from the ventilation shaft—how long it would take at a dead run, assuming he could manage one over the broken stones and uneven ground.

Looked at from a different angle, the stranger's trick with the stones seemed less delightful and more uncanny. Five hops every time. There was something wrong in the precision of that. Mathematical, unsettlingly deliberate, as if it weren't a game at all but a ritual, performed for some sinister, unguessable purpose.

And it had been twenty days before Callion even realized the woman was wandering about in the ruin. There could be other people out here—or things that weren't people—  
He dropped his cigarette abruptly and strode back to the ventilation shaft, fighting himself to keep from breaking into a run.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The main changes I made to this chapter when I switched the genders was to cut out screaming (or stifled screaming) from Callion. I wanted the gender roles of the Warren to be similar to Earth gender roles, and men are socialized out of showing fear in the same way that women are. In other words, I actually had to change more things making Callion male than I did in making the Doctor female. I found that fascinating. Not sure anyone else is interested, but I found it fascinating.

It was two days before Callion ventured onto the surface again. He'd had these fits of fear before—it was only natural, considering—but the night of the skipping stones had been the most severe. He spent an evening in the 413-50 common room, laughing and smoking and making bad jokes with Ulsine and Meru, the girls in the living quarters. It was the closest he'd felt to them in—actually, he couldn't remember feeling so happy and charitable toward his LQ-mates, ever. He remembered thinking, _this is where I belong,_ and resolving to give up the surface as a youthful indiscretion. It was safe down here and nothing could hurt him, and that was the way it should be.

Nevertheless, he found himself slipping down the alley after work the next day. He went through the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY door—no point in standing there in indecision, not where someone could see him—and stared at the ladder for a moment.

He really should just walk away.

Instead, he put his foot on the first rung of the ladder and started pulling himself up. He had gotten stronger since the first time, or at least gotten used to the punishing climb; it seemed shorter now.

He pushed the door open and stepped outside.

It was a very pretty just-before-lights-out. Half the void was covered with mottled purple brushstrokes, and the bit nearest the sun was a pale yellow that reminded Callion of the flavor called "limon." (He didn't know exactly what a limon was, but most flavors were like that; what in the Warren was a "grape," anyway besides mauve?) He turned in place, took a deep, appreciative breath—the surface had such a sharp, fresh smell to it—and decided not to go down to the water tonight. Not because he was nervous about the stranger. Not at all. Just because there were plenty of other things to look at in the ruins.

For instance, there was the round building. It was up the hill, away from the water, and made of paler stuff than most of the buildings. It also had decorations carved into the walls for no purpose that Callion could discern. Mostly they were geometric designs, triangles and zigzags. The building was also set up on steps, as if to separate it from the rest of the city; there were scraggly, stringy plants growing through the cracks in the stairs, now. Callion had wondered if the size and the decorations meant the building had been important somehow, but he hadn't managed to figure out what the place was for. The last time he tried exploring it, he lost the light before he did more than clamber over a few rocks.  
This time, the sun was red by the time he got to the round building, but not gone. He found a gap in the walls—one of many, as the round building wasn't in good shape. A slab of whitish stone had toppled outward to form an accidental ramp. Callion walked up it.

The buildings' floors had been some kind of tile, but that was all Callion could tell about the inside at first glance. It was a mess in here. He was in some sort of wide, curved hallway, one that had probably run all the way around the circular building. Fallen stone, probably from the ceiling, made the whole place nearly impassable. Right across from the gap in the wall, a sort of stone post stood; presumably it had once held up the ceiling, but now it just looked forlorn. There was some sort of wire frame sticking out from underneath the nearest fallen slab, and Callion poked at it curiously. A rack meant to hold something, he could tell that much. It had had a label on top, once. Callion picked up the fragment and turned it over.

It was brushed brassy metal with black letters and the letters said NONF. The rest of the plaque was missing.

Callion couldn't think of a single useful word that began with NONF. Perhaps it was a pre-Warren thing.

He spotted a glint further in and picked his way carefully through the stones. Once, he stepped on a huge slab in a way that made it rock precariously, and he jerked back with his heart pounding. If he twisted his ankle out here he would have to get back all by himself, and admin only knew how he would cope with the ladder. But he wanted to see what was beyond the circular hallway, if anything, and with the rubble piled up all the way to the inner wall, it shouldn't be too hard—

Something made a noise.

Callion felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. The surface had normal noises, and this wasn't one of them. It wasn't the air circulating, it wasn't the rustle of an unseen rodent, it wasn't the drone of one of those not-quite-flies. It was a deliberate clicking. Coming closer.

It had to be the stranger, he thought, stepping backwards. That was all. And she wasn't really something to be afraid of. Clothes like nothing in the Warren, rock-skipping—so what? She was still a human being—

Callion stepped on something that went _crunch._

Looked down.

Little white pebbles—that's what his eyes said at first. Just part of the rubble. Except that once he looked closer, he noticed the dried stuff that was holding them more or less together. And the fingernails.

Callion let out a strangled grunt of shock. And that was when the Deathdealer came over the wall.

It looked like a spider, only wronger. And bigger, much bigger, easily two meters tall. It was made of gleaming silver metal, the spikes reflecting blood-colored, near-extinguished sunlight. Its eyes looked almost human but it had too many of them, set in unnatural places. The ones on its knees were even with Callion's own eyes, and he could see the pupils contract as the thing focused all its attention on him.

There was a metallic whine, and two tubes appeared from under the belly of the Deathdealer. Callion didn't see a mouth, but something whined, _"Identify—"_ in a harsh, electric monotone.

Callion didn't wait to see if there was another word in the sentence. He whirled and bolted.

Something behind him made a _crack_ sound, like a sheet being snapped but ten times louder. Callion tried to double his speed. That was a shot. It had to be. Dealthdealers had no mercy, they shot any humans they saw, they were relentless and merciless and he had been treating the surface as a game, a forbidden fling like kissing Jerocca behind the shop but now he was never going to make it home tonight, he was going to die, up here and all alone and scared and running because that was what happened to anyone who met a Deathdealer—

The shot didn't repeat. He didn't dare look back to see if it were still behind him. It was a Deathdealer, and therefore it had to be. His only hope was the ventilation shaft, the ladder, the Warren. Smelly, run-down, dripping, wondrous, how could he ever have wanted to climb out of the Warren, even for an instant? He vaulted the metal beam that stuck out into the path and rounded the corner with the broken red glass, not daring to think what might happen if he tripped or skewered his foot. If he stopped running, he'd die. If he slowed, he'd die.

And there, low and dark now that the sun had disappeared, was the ventilation building. Callion pounded up to it at a dead sprint, hitting it palms-first to slow himself, and wrenched the door open. He threw a look over her shoulder and didn't see the Deathdealer, but it was still behind him, it had to be, he had to get down—

Inside the building, a figure moved out of the shadows. Callion made an inarticulate noise.

"Right," the woman said. "Explain everything."

\------------

"There's a Deathdealer after me," Callion panted. "I have to—" Reason caught up with him, bringing cold dread. "Oh. Oh, _no._ I can't go down." Because if he disappeared into the ventilation building and didn't come out, the Deathdealers would investigate it. And if they investigated, they would find the shaft, and if they found the shaft, they would find the Warren, and then they swarm down and kill everyone. Hordes of metallic, spiky spider-things with eyes on every joint, stalking through the tunnels—Meru dead, Sapell dead, everyone he could name and everyone he couldn't—the remains of humanity wiped out because one stupid, _stupid_ little boy felt curious one day. "I have to lead it away. I have to make it think I'm the only—" He was shaking. "I have—I have to let it have me. I have to—you stay here. Stay here and don't make a sound, not for anything. You understand?"

He didn't wait for an answer. He groped behind himself, opened the door, and flung himself outside before her sense caught up with him and froze him in panic. Part of him was screaming _I don't want to do this I don't want to do this I don't want to die_ like a monotonous internal siren. His coverall was drenched with sweat and it was colder than he could ever remember the surface being. He shut the door behind himself and looked around, hunched over and ready to bolt.

No Deathdealer.

Callion darted for the shadow of the nearest ruin, not that shadows meant much now that the sun was out of sight. Perhaps he could hide for a little while. Perhaps he could lead the thing away from the ventilation building, far away, so that none of the machines could ever backtrack and figure out that he had nearly gone to ground there.

He would have thought that his ears were roaring too hard to make out any sound beyond his own heartbeat. Instead, he clearly heard the door open and then close with a click.

He whirled to look at the stranger, who was pacing across the open ground with an unhurried arrogance that matched or surpassed any admin Callion had ever met. Callion motioned to her frantically, then hissed, "Are you crazy? _Go back!"_

"You plan to run toward the river?" The stranger didn't even lower her voice. "Either you're a very confident swimmer or you understand nothing of strategy."

"What?" Several of those words hadn't even made sense.

"Never mind for now." The stranger passed Callion, then turned to face him, meaning that she was looking back in the direction of the round building where the Deathdealer would come from, and Callion wasn't. Callion put his back to the wall and tried to watch both directions at once. "You're being chased by one of those awkward machines," the woman went on, "and you want it decoyed from your bolthole. Correct?" Callion nodded. "In that case, I have a proposition for you. Let the machine chase me instead. I'll lead it down to the harbor, you can return to—whatever it is that you do down there. With," she added in a somewhat harder tone, "the clear understanding that this is the only favor I do you. I am not getting attached, I am not getting involved, and I most certainly am not going to try to _fix things."_ Her tone made the two words sound like a dire fate. "Not this time. What do you say?"

Callion realized he'd let his mouth fall open slightly. "You—you can't. You'll die."

"Hardly your problem."

Callion shook his head. "I'm the one it's chasing—"

"They don't seem very sophisticated. I doubt they care."

"But it's my fault!"

The stranger narrowed her eyes. "If you truly believe mistakes deserve death, I doubt you and I will be friends."

There was something ominous about the way she said it. Callion’s first impulse was to babble, _of course we’re friends, of course we can be friends,_ as if not being friends might carry some dire consequence.

"Not that we would have had the opportunity in any case," the stranger added, in a somewhat less forboding tone of voice. "At any rate, we don't have time for dithering. I will go address your monster. You—" She strode past Callion, back toward the Deathdealer, and waved her hand vaguely as she tossed the last words over her shoulder. "Do whatever you like."

"But," Callion hissed after her desperately, _"you'll die!_ What, are you stupid?"

The stranger stopped in her tracks. Callion thought for a moment that she was going to turn on him in a rage. And then she laughed.

In other circumstances, it might not have been quite so surreal. But with a Deathdealer after them—Callion just stared. She was insane. She was broken. She wasn't right. And was it just Callion’s imagination, or was there more than a trace of bitterness in that laughter, as if Callion’s question had struck the stranger as the blackest, bleakest humor she'd ever heard—

"Impenetrably," said the stranger, and walked away to meet the Deathdealer.


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something that I think may be harder, throughout this story, is selling the Doctor as intimidating. I'm interested to see how it works.

Callion let the stranger go.

He should have run after her. Should have persuaded her, shaken her, hit her if he had to, anything to keep her from throwing her life away. But he didn't. He thought about it—even took a few steps—but when it came down to it, Callion didn't want to die. So he went back into the ventilation building and climbed down the ladder, hands damp, and shaking both from lingering fear and guilt.

When he got back to his LQ, Meru took her earphones out and said, "Callion, what's wrong?"

Callion shook his head. "I just—need a smoke."

"I'll say." Meru gave him one and then had to light it for him. "You sure you're all right? You've been acting—I don't know, weird—"

"I'll be fine. I'm over it." Over the surface for good. Never going back up. Ever.

The strange woman in her strange clothes was over the surface for good, too. Just in a different way. Callion suppressed a shudder and took a long drag on his cigarette. It didn't help much.

He slowed down the line at work the next day, which was one of the few unforgivable sins of the cigarette factory. He'd think he was all right, not thinking about it, not dwelling on it, and then the clack from one of the neighboring machines would remind him of the Deathdealer's metallic legs.

By the time the end-of-shift horn was broadcast, Callion had made up his mind. He caught up with Sapell and Norrem on the way out. "Um. Sapell?"

Sapell turned around, looking surprised. "What is it?"

"I was wondering if I could go to the bar with you guys." It sounded stupid. Needy. They would be able to tell he was avoiding something, even if they couldn't possibly guess what it was—

"Finally!" Sapell said, grinning. "Little boy’s all grown up."

Several hours later, Callion was feeling a bit better even though he'd proved ridiculously bad at girl-snagging, as Sapell put it. He hadn't drunk all that much—he was afraid he would start talking about the surface if he did—but the alcohol still made him feel a little warmer. And, for once, he'd been a normal person doing normal things with other normal people. He could do this. He could give up his self-destructive obsession with the surface, he could live a normal life, he could go to work and come home and find a nice girl (although please, please, not quite yet). It wouldn't drive him crazy. He'd survive.

He said good-bye to Sapell and Norrem—they were good people, friendly people, he'd find common ground with them if it killed him—and strolled back toward Complex 413. Through the access tunnel, past the defunct ID scanner and the heavy doors that were never used anymore, and out into the commons.

There was a cart parked in front of 413-50.

It didn't have DELIVERY stencilled on the side, which meant it had to be enforcement. Everyone else in the Warren walked or, if they had circulation passes, used the trains. And enforcement couldn't be there for Meru or Ulsine or any of the three other boys. They weren't the most rule-abiding people—Buriand, in particular, had been in more barfights than he had teeth—but that was nothing for enforcement to make a personal trip for. It had to be Callion.

Callion found that he had edged toward the alley, as if it represented safety. He stopped himself. Plenty of people had one or two marks on their record; this would be his first major one. They'd scold him, probably severely, and give him extra work-hours. Perhaps he'd have to wear a beeper, which would mean no more outings with Norrem and Sapell, but he had been remarkably stupid and reckless. They wouldn't do anything bad to him. He'd be all right.

 _Moved to another complex,_ Divon's voice muttered in Callion's memory, _that's what they say. And they don't tell you where, and they make it so you have to have a pass to go find out. And if they know you're poking around, well, they don't let you earn the pass. Mark my words, kiddo, when people go away they go_ gone, _and the whole Warren is built to shuffle you about so you don't notice._

Callion shook his head, at first slowly, then more desperately. He wanted this not to be happening. He wanted it almost as hard as he had wanted the Deathdealer not to exist, or the stranger not to have—

"I never did get that explanation," a voice said right by his ear.

\-----------------

Callion let out a _gaah!_ of startlement and whipped around.

It was the stranger. It couldn't be the stranger, but it was.

She wasn't dead. She’d walked into the ruins to face a Deathdealer, but she wasn't dead. Callion struggled for words. "How—"

"Yes, I get that a lot."

In the light of the Warren, the woman’s clothing looked even more bizarre. Patterns of color and straps to hold up the trouser part, which was entirely separate from the top. "Who—"

"And that one, too."

"But—"

The woman waited a moment to see if Callion would come up with something to follow that, and then rolled her eyes. "Let's abbreviate this, shall we? I have a great many questions about this place. The more I see, the fewer answers I expect you to be capable of providing, but I did go to the trouble of saving your life and it seems a pity to waste that. So what do you say? Shall we go somewhere and talk?"

"I can’t do that,” Callion said, feeling dazed, “they're going to arrest me. And probably you, if you're still around when they come out. You should—"

"I should what?" The woman's face looked harsh and unfriendly. "You expect me to rescue you, is that it?"

"No, of course not! You should go. Back where you came from." Wherever that was.

"Oh, no. Not on your life, or mine. But you're half-right; I should leave. Your problems are not my affair." She turned around, strode toward the alley, and then stopped. "Just out of curiosity, you understand," the woman said, sounding as if the sentence was being pulled out of her, "what are you going to be arrested for?"

"For being on the surface! Oh, and for going through that door without authorization." Callion felt a prickle of irritation at the woman’s self-righteous attitude. She’d been on the surface just as much as Callion had. "And _you'll_ get arrested for wearing that—whatever the admin that is."

The stranger drew herself up stiffly, turned around, and gave Callion a Look. It wasn't an unamused look so much as _the_ unamused look, the pattern for all future expressions of massive and bruised dignity. "There is nothing. Wrong. With my clothes.” She held the glare for a moment, then shook her head very slightly and sighed.

"Um. Are you all right? I mean, this isn't your fifth offense, or anything. Is it?"

"Why? What happens when—" The woman cut herself off. "I think perhaps we should go back up your rabbit-hole and discuss this at our leisure." She strode back toward the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY door. After four or five steps, she paused and said, without looking at Callion, "Are you coming or not?"

"I'm coming," Callion said, and followed her.

\---------------

The stranger had a way of stopping the fans.

It made sense. Callion was more slight than she was, and would have an easier time squeezing between the fans and the wall. As he came in, she slipped a metal box into her pocket.

"What's that?" Callion said.

"A remote control."

"It makes the fans stop?"

"I daresay it will interact with most of the local technology. I made it last night." The stranger started up the ladder before Callion, not waiting to see if he were really coming. The fans were already slowing.

"You're not going to leave them like that," Callion said to the woman’s shoes. "Are you? The fans, I mean."

"Yes, of course I am. And then I'm going to paint a giant yellow arrow on the wall and label it CRIMINALS WENT THIS WAY. What do _you_ think?"

Callion made a face at her. He had been more worried about air circulation— _do not block the vents_ was drilled into every child from the day they could walk—but the woman had a good point, one Callion hadn't considered.

"Didn't your parents ever tell you your face would stick like that?"

And how in the Warren had she seen that? Did she have eyes in her feet? "No. I only had one dorm-father, and he had too much on his mind to worry about the small stuff."

"Dorm-father," the woman repeated.

"Yeah. My dorm-father. Not all dorms are run by women, you know. That's just one of those things people assume."

"A stereotype, I believe your forebearers would have called it." The woman was silent for a moment. "Did you ever know your body-parents?"

Callion blinked up at her, startled. "How should I know? I could have met them any time, but it's not as if children come with labels."

"Ah. I see."

Callion turned the phrase over in his head once or twice. The woman's tone seemed to imbue it with significance. "What do you see?"

The woman had reached the top of the ladder. She disappeared over the rim, but her voice came back with the slight reverberation that the concrete shaft gave it. "A great many things. Here." She offered her hand to help Callion up.

Callion found himself a bit uncomfortable with the gesture. He didn't know this person. He didn't know if he could trust her. For all Callion knew, the woman might push him back down the shaft just to watch him fall.

She didn't, of course. Once Callion was up, she walked over to the door and opened it.

"There are Deathdealers out there," Callion objected in a whisper.

"Not at the moment."

"How do you know?"

"Your Deathdealers follow strict routes. There won't be one within scanning distance until midnight. And I want to look at the stars." The woman sat down, close enough to lean on the ventilation house, and tilted her head back.

Callion's eyes had adjusted somewhat during the climb, so he could see the woman’s face, at least as a pattern of shadows and darker shadows. He thought she was wearing somewhat the same sad, lost expression she'd displayed right before she started throwing rocks into the river. "Do you want a cigarette?" Callion offered.

"No." The woman didn't move, or even look at Callion to see if the brusque rejection was too brusque, but she added after a minute, "In many cultures, smoke inhalation is considered a medical emergency. And in many others, it simply isn't done."

Callion shrugged, sat down a little ways away, and lit up. "So you don't smoke at _all?_ I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't." Admin, soldiers and some profs weren't supposed to, for reasons that were never explained, but many of them did anyway. "Are you admin, then?" "No."

"And what do you mean, many—cultures? What's a culture?" Callion thought about it. "For that matter, what's a rabbit? You used that word, too. And—" He tried to remember some of the woman's other incomprehensibilities.

"A rabbit is a bit like a rat. You do have rats down there, don't you?"

"Of course we—where do you live, anyway? How do you not _know_ that?"

The woman smiled slightly. "I'm from up there," she said, and pointed up at the starry void.

Callion had to move his mouth silently for a moment before his voice came back. "That's impossible."

"Your ancestors are from space as well, and not long ago as these things are reckoned. Have you lost that?"

"But—you mean—as in, the stars. The actual stars. Where the Deathdealers come from."

The woman paused. "I had never seen one of those robots before I landed on this world. I've met many beings which could be accurately characterized as deathdealers."

"But that's—that's wrong. They're supposed to be everywhere, up there."

"You cannot possibly imagine how large this galaxy is, let alone the universe. I know, because I can't imagine it, and I have a much greater capacity for such things." She tapped the side of her head and looked sideways at Callion. "Hyper-subitization. Bred to the bone, so to speak. You wouldn't understand the specifics; just take it as read that I can _feel_ much larger numbers than you." She looked back up at the void. "At any rate, nothing is everywhere. Not even nothingness . . ."

Callion shivered as the stranger trailed off. It was cold out here. The stranger's talk wasn't making it seem any warmer. "Listen—what's your name, anyway?"

"Interesting question."

"What's that supposed to mean? You've got to have a name, everyone has a name—" Everyone human. If the stranger came from the stars, did that make her as inhuman as the Deathdealers?

"What if what you called yourself was predicated on your behavior? What if you named yourself in the belief that you were one thing, and then discovered that you were, or could be, another? If you called yourself Peace, for instance, and then discovered within yourself a reservoir of absolute and indelible rage?" She didn't seem to expect an answer, which was good, because Callion had no idea what she was trying to say. "Pick something to call me. I'll try it on and decide whether I like it."

"Um . . . Torris?" There had been a Torris in Callion's dorm. Even as he said it, Callion knew it wasn't right. Torris had been normal. Torris got out of bed one foot at a time and put her student coverall on and tormented the boys and had the dorm-father shout at her for it. _Stranger_ was a much better word for this woman. It captured the surreality of her.

If she really did come from the stars, there was nothing at all to connect her to Callion, not even the tentative bond of living in the Warren; the entire Warren could burn, and it wouldn't affect her. And hadn't she implied that Callion's fate meant nothing to her?

Stranger. Dangerous. She didn't even look like a Torris.

"Torris," the stranger who didn't look like a Torris said. "I'll think about it. What's your name?"

"Callion," Callion said.

"Hmm," Not-Torris said, and was silent.

The air circulation, or whatever one called it on the surface, was making a distant whispering sound like ghosts in conversation. The stars, for just a moment, seemed like thousands of far-off eyes, all focused on Callion.

Callion stood up, abruptly unwilling to stay here. Lights-out on the surface was bad enough alone. Lights-out when you _weren't_ alone—that might be worse. Depending on what sort of person Not-Torris was, what she intended to do with Callion, it might be much worse. Arrest, at least, was a knowable danger. "You said you wanted to ask me questions," Callion said, and felt his voice to be much too loud against the silence. He imagined the distant ghosts hushing each other, hissing, _what's that? Who's there? Who trespasses?_ "What questions? Why don't you just ask them?"

Not-Torris looked up at her and then, slowly, rose to her feet.

Callion backed up until his shoulder hit the corner of the ventilation building.

"On second thought," Not-Torris said, very mildly, "I will have one of those cigarettes."

Well, Callion had offered. It would be rude to shout, _no, now stop stalling!_ Callion pulled a cigarette out of his pack and held it out at arm's length.

Not-Torris _was_ stalling. She was stalling deliberately, and that implied something specific was going to happen. "Is it just you?" Callion said, as Not-Torris plucked the cigarette from her fingers. "Are you alone out here?" If she had accomplices . . .

There was a slight pause, so slight that Callion almost thought he imagined it. "Yes. I'm alone." Not-Torris sniffed the side of the cigarette. Then she unrolled it, put a finger in the brown shredded tobaccomoss, and touched the finger to her tongue.

Callion stared at her. "Um. Er. That's not—the way you're—supposed to—"

Not-Torris tossed her ruined cigarette aside, stepped forward, plucked the cigarette out of Callion’s mouth, and threw it to the ground before Callion had a chance to protest. Then she stepped on it and ground out the orange glow.

"Excuse me," Callion said, surprise mingling with outrage, "but that was my cigarette!"

"They aren't good for you."

"It was my cigarette! Mine, belonging to me. And you grabbed it right out of my mouth! Look, I don't care what benighted dorm you come from—and no, I _don't_ believe this ridiculous 'stars' story—if you weren't brought up in a hole with the rats, someone had to explain the difference between _yours_ and _mine—"_

"They tried. And then I nicked their boots." The woman flashed a smirk. "So. Questions."

"You can't just—"

"Just a moment ago, you were desperate to get on with it. So you could get arrested before the evening rush, perhaps."

Callion glared at her. "Fine. Ask." He added, in a mutter, "Choom-breath."

"I heard that." She didn't seem especially offended, though. "I suppose what I need most is a brief history of this planet, with an emphasis on why the humans live in holes and what happened to the environment. Shall we sit down again?"

"Might as well," Callion said, and brushed off a likely piece of rubble. "'Planet' is an old-fashioned word for 'world,' right?"

He got an unreadable look, but all Torris said was, "Yes, I expect it is. Do go on."

"Well, I don't know much about history. That's a prof thing, they don't teach it in school. But maybe a hundred years ago, the Deathdealers invaded and started killing everything. They had all the advantages—better weapons, no need to eat or sleep, nothing on their minds except wiping out all life —so the humans had to retreat. The Warren was built and our ancestors piled into it. The Deathdealers prowl the surface looking for things to kill, but so long as we stay deep and don't give ourselves away, we're safe." Callion shook another cigarette out of his box.

"Don't do that."

"You're going to tell me when I can _smoke?"_

"Yes."

Callion put the cigarette back. A moment ago, before Torris annoyed him, he had been frightened of this woman. And when the Deathdealer was chasing him, when the woman had said _I doubt you and I will be friends,_ Callion had felt a trace of that same chill. Perhaps he really should get this over with and climb back down, back to the comfort of other people and solid ceilings overhead. Not to mention lights that were less cold and remote than the stars. "All right."

"You're quite sure," Torris said thoughtfully, "that the Deathdealers wanted to wipe out all _life._ Not just all humans, or all sapient life."

"That's the way I always heard it," Callion said. "Why, does it matter?"

Torris gave her another look, one that said, _that was such a stupid question that I want it framed for posterity._ "'Does it matter.' Everything matters. Everything is connected. With perfect instruments, which are of course impossible, a sufficiently advanced mind could map this solar system just by watching a single atom of hydrogen, because it all fits—except for one thing."

"What?"

"Your story."

Callion frowned. "It's not a story," he said. "It happened." What was so ill-fitting about it? Why the strong emphasis Torris had put on _all life?_ "Wait . . . the flower! It's alive. Why wouldn't the Deathdealers kill it? It's not like they have a lot of humans to hunt—" He got up and hurried around to the back of the metal building, where the vent was. "Unless they got it yesterday. But—" No, it was still there, looking black in the colorless starlight. The fragile flower was gone, leaving only a white button-shaped thing on a stalk, but the leaves were intact. "No, it's still here."

"There you are, then." Torris had followed him. "All your history, debunked by a dandelion."

"A what?" Callion said.

"A flower of that species. Your world was terraformed—possibly best not to get into that. Suffice it to say that I've seen others like it."

"Dandelion," Callion repeated to himself. It sounded exotic. "How do you know it wasn't just lucky?"

"We're breathing," Torris said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that this planet has more than one dandelion. The oceanic ecosystem is largely intact. There's a disturbing paucity of animal life—in particular, I've seen no birds—but my craft's scanners record a saltwater marsh just south of this city, and forests of a sort to the east. There are still functioning biomes on this planet, at least one of them on land where it can be seen by all and sundry. Now, how much of that did you understand?"

Callion counted to ten in his mind, then said as calmly as he could, "All right, I get it. I'm stupid. That's old news." He turned away abruptly, not wanting Torris to see his face. Old news, perhaps, but school had still driven him to tears sometimes—the disapproval of his teachers, his dorm-father's painful, dutiful praise at any tests he didn't fail, which wasn't many—

Torris put her hand on Callion’s shoulder, making him flinch away. "Stupid," she said, more quietly than before, "is not the word you're looking for."

Callion hadn't known Torris could approach gentle, however imperfectly. He wished she hadn't. Sarcastic and patronizing were both easier to get angry at. "What should I call myself, then?" he said harshly. "Since you've got such an enormous brain. What would you suggest? Idiot? Imbecile? Moldhead?"

"Prisoner."

Callion blinked. "What?"

"Care for a nice long walk?" Torris strode past him and then turned, cocking her head. "I want to show you something."


	4. 4

It wasn't as long a walk as Torris made it sound.

It wasn't as if she was unused to walking, either. She strode ahead of Callion, climbing or jumping bits of rubble without breaking stride, and didn't even seem to be breathing hard. The only times she slowed down were to make sure Callion wasn't lagging, and she was very conscientious about that. She thought, Callion decided with a bit of ire, that he was soft.

Stupid was bad enough. Soft was just insulting.

It was easy enough to see, though. There was a very bright—Callion wasn't sure it was a star, exactly, because it looked roundish and didn't show up every lights-out. But it was much more brilliant than all the rest of the stars, shining steadily rather than flickering. It made walking much easier than it could have been.

At one point, Torris started making that high-pitched musical sound. Callion scurried to catch up with her, to see how she was doing it, and found himself at just as much of a loss as before. From the looks of it, Torris was just pursing her lips. "What," she said, "is that?"

"This sound? Whistling. You've never heard it before?"

"No," Callion said. "How does it work?"

"Hard to explain. Just experiment until you manage it; that's the way most people learn. Of course, there are some strains of humanity who aren't actually capable of whistling, but that shouldn't include you. Reasonably pure Terran ancestry, slightly gengineered for all the usual disease resistance, with a touch of Yulian Nocturnal. That Nocturnal heritage is probably where you get the low melanin and the above-average night-vision, by the way. So. No whistling. I don't suppose people play musical instruments in your Warren either."

"Like, machines to make noise? Well, there were the tootles when I was little. They were made out of plastic piping, you blew across them—" He tried to demonstrate with motions, feeling rather foolish. "The older kids taught the younger ones how to make them."

"Yes, they would have to, wouldn't they."

"What do you mean?"

"Something is rotten on the planet of Garden."

"What, like food?" Callion had never heard of anything else rotting.

"No."

Callion wasn't sure what to make of this. "Torris," he said, after a moment, "how sure are you that we won't meet any Deathdealers?"

"Mm . . ." Torris climbed over a slanted metal pole that had wedged itself between two buildings. "No."

"What?"

"I don't think Torris works."

"I—all right. Parli?"

"I can try it on, certainly," Parli said with a doubtful air. "And don't worry about Deathdealers."

"All right." He wasn't sure it actually was all right, but Parli sounded very definite.

"You realize you're indulging in sloppy thinking. How confident I am doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how right I am."

"So, you don't _really_ know if we'll run into Deathdealers."

"Oh, no. I'm quite certain they won't be a problem."

"But you just said—"

"I have also," Parli said, "on vanishingly rare occasions and only under the most adverse of conditions, mind you, been _wrong._ So stay alert, or some facsimile thereof, because if you get into trouble I will walk away."

Callion decided not to respond.

They had gotten into a part of the ruins with a lot of rusted and collapsed machinery. Callion couldn't even guess at the function of most of it. There was one tall machine that he skirted around, not wanting to walk under the huge upward-pointing arm for fear that it would fall on him. Parli strode right under it, but didn't comment on Callion’s caution.  
And then they emerged onto a wide spur of concrete, and there was no more city.

Instead, there was water. _Endless water._ Callion stopped and stared.

"According to your library," Parli said, "this is was once called the Menjavere Sea. It's close to four thousand kilometers across. That's not drinkable water down there; it's salty enough to pickle with. And in this sea, and others like it around your planet, there are billions of living organisms which keep your air breathable. Never mind how, for right now; just understand that it works and if it stopped working, every human, rat, and insect would asphyxiate—that means 'choke to death.' That's what I was talking about earlier, but there's a more important point to this excursion."

"A more important point?" It was so _flat._ It went on out almost to forever, and then it just ended, in a line that could have been drawn by a machine. Now that Parli mentioned it, the whole place did smell just a little bit like pickles. Looking at it, Callion felt a little of the dizziness that had first afflicted him upon opening the door to the surface.

"Prisons. Cages. The most effective way to imprison a sapient being is to utterly destroy their ability to ask, 'How do I get out?' Two minutes ago, you were incapable of asking, 'How deep is the sea?' Not because you were coerced, not because you were threatened. Because of the shape of your world. Are you starting to wonder, yet?"

"Wonder what?"

"What else you're missing. What questions they've stolen."

"I—" To buy himself time to think, Callion walked over to the edge of the concrete. It extended over the water, supported by thick, square pylons, and the waves made hollow slapping sounds that echoed in the dark space underneath. Callion flopped down on his stomach to get a better look at it. "I understand why admin didn't tell anyone about this," he said, his voice reverberating slightly. "Someone would have wanted to come and look. And then the Deathdealers would get them, and probably the rest of us too. We really shouldn't be here."

"Nobody tells me where I can or cannot go." Absolutely unyielding. Parli might have realized that she was sounding harsh again, because the next thing she said was slightly lighter in tone. "And I think, in time, that your questions will lead you away from your warren. But ultimately, that's none of my affair. I didn't come here to start a revolution. I came by accident." She snorted. "For an exceedingly dubious value of the word accident. Certain Rectangular Blue Entities are attempting to gently steer me back into my accustomed patterns. Certain Rectangular Blue Entities have a limited grasp of subtlety."

"I don't understand," Callion said.

"No, I expect not." Parli sat down, looking out at the Menjavere Sea. "It's complicated." Callion was silent. After a moment, Parli added, "You're not going to ask me to explain?" She sounded disappointed.

"I probably wouldn't understand even if you explained it," Callion admitted, and sat down next to her. "You use a lot of words I don't understand. And—" He looked down. "I'm really not all that smart."

"Not compared to _me,"_ Parli said, "but you don't want to go comparing yourself to me. It would only depress you, for one thing, and for another, intelligence is a neutral quality."

"I don't understand," Callion said. He felt like he'd been repeating it for days.

"I'm extremely bright."

Callion rolled his eyes. "And modest."

"Can we keep the color commentary to a minimum while I'm making a deeply significant point? Thank you. As I was saying, I'm extremely bright. So what?"

"So . . ." Callion stopped.

"So, did I earn it? Was it some sort of prize for diligence, perhaps, or selfless devotion to my fellow beings? Of course not. I was born with it. Does it make me a good person? I can tell you, with more confidence than any other being in the universe: I come with no such guarantee. Can I even swear that I've never used my intelligence to harm anyone? No. I cannot. Intelligence is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor detrimental. Intelligent beings may know things that you do not and perhaps cannot understand, but if you ever meet someone who tries to convince you that makes them _better—_ that they should rule over you, or have more than you, or that they invariably know the moral thing to do—I suggest a general policy of cautious politesse and running like hell. Intelligence doesn't automatically lead to wisdom. Sometimes I doubt they're even corrolated." Much quieter, so soft that it almost disappeared under the slapping noises of the water, "I certainly don't know what to do, anymore."

Callion studied her for a moment. "Parli," he said slowly, "are you all right?"

"Hmm—no."

"What's wrong?"

"To start with, I don't feel the slightest bit like a Parli."

Perhaps the woman hadn't roamed the surface since the Warren was created, Callion thought, but she was slightly insane. "All right. Um . . . Alorin?”

"I could try it, I suppose." Alorin sounded dubious.

"What's wrong?"

For a moment, Callion thought Alorin was just going to stare out at the sea and not answer. Then she said, "I don't remember."

"What?"

"Or rather, I remember quite a bit of it, but my memories are muddled and inchoate and may be untrustworthy. Meeting another self, even a fragment of self, is hazardous that way. And that's leaving aside the most critical dilemma, whether I can trust _me._ Do you always wear beige?"

Callion blinked at the sudden subject change. "What?"

"Every time I've seen you, you've worn an identical garment. Same color, same lack-of-shape. Is that mandated?"

Callion wasn't sure what _mandated_ meant. "Well, I work at the cigarette factory. This is what cigarette factory workers—wait. _Every_ time you've seen me? You've only seen me twice . . ."

"Once, as I broke into the infomat." Alorin ticked off the incidents on her fingers. "Once as I was exploring. Once after I'd set out a sandwich for you, which you didn't seem to want at all; I don't think you spotted me that time. Once when I was skipping stones. Last night during the Deathdealer incident, and again today. Six times."

"Wait, you knew that I was—"

"Following me around the ruins? Of course I did."

"And all those sandwiches were for me—"

"Yes, well, you kept vanishing behind buildings like a frightened mouse. How was I to know you were getting enough to eat?" She sounded deeply annoyed, as if Callion’s disregard of the sandwiches had insulted her personally. "The point is, you're required by law or custom to wear that—" She seemed not to have a word for Callion's coverall. "Sack." She paused, as Callion tried to think of something sufficiently scathing to say about her multicolored clothes. "I grew up in a constrained world myself," Alorin went on. "Although I expect it was for entirely different reasons. Customs regarding clothing. Customs regarding food. Customs regarding whom one ought to speak to, and how to address them. _Appropriateness_ in everything—how I came to despise that word! A proper way to think, to feel—even private emotions were subject to censure, if you were clumsy enough to let them be known. Hateful, stale civilization. Except—" A long pause. "You have to wonder. What if they were afraid of something real? What were they trying to suppress with all those rules?"

"I don't know," Callion said, thoroughly lost. "What?"

"Me."

For no reason he could name, the word sent a little chill up Callion's spine. Perhaps it was the way Alorin said it.

"Perhaps not me specifically. But something like me. Something in me, something that may exist inside all—" She cut herself off. "There is an aspect of myself that I must be wary of. Some quirk due to rampage out of control, some tendency that could—will?—lead to ruin. And because I can't remember, I don't know what it is." She clenched a fist on the last sentence, then relaxed it very deliberately. "What would you do, Callion, if you thought that something about you was going to lead to disaster? How far would you go to change yourself?"

Callion looked away. "I did try. A couple of times, even. After I watched you do the—with the rocks and the water—and after I thought you'd been killed by Deathdealers. I told myself I was giving up the surface forever. I thought I meant it. But here I am again."

"Oh, don't be absurd. Coming to the surface isn't remotely what I meant. In fact, I'm not even sure why I bothered to ask you." Callion opened his mouth, trying to think of a sufficiently acidic response to this latest bit of condescension, and found that he couldn't think of anything withering enough. "After all," Alorin went on, "you're decent, self-sacrificing, and kind, at least from the little I've seen. What could you possibly know?"

"I—how—you would be _so much easier_ to talk to if I knew whether you were insulting me from one minute to the next!" Callion managed finally.

Alorin snorted. It sounded like actual amusement. "You're starting to sound like someone who's known me for a while. Yes, if you aren't sure, I'm probably being at least mildly insulting, but you mustn't take it too seriously, you know. I'm an irascible old woman from time to time."

"You're not that old," Callion said. "You can't be more than—I don't know, forty . . ." Although forty was old enough to start losing yourself. "You certainly don't act like an old woman," Callion said, half to reassure himself.

She acted like nothing else Callion had ever encountered.

"Really." And Alorin was giving him one of those inscrutable searching looks. "What does an old woman act like, in your experience?"

"You know. Saying the same thing every day, at the same time. Or, when their machine goes offline, acting as if they're still working—you know, making the motions—even after the shift boss takes them away from the machine." Callion looked away again. The thought of Alorin locked into repetitive motion, unable to stop until the end-of-shift horn sounded—unable to be erratic and exasperating and full of words—the image disturbed him much more than it should have. "It's scary when you think about it," he went on in a low voice. "When you try to think what it must feel like. I mean, what if old people aren't really _gone—_ what if their bodies just get so used to things that they keep on going, and the actual _person_ part is stuck inside, not being able to talk to anybody, or—"

"It's not age," Alorin said very quietly.

Callion wasn't quite listening to her. He was busy fighting off the nasty chill his own words had given him. "This is the problem with me," he said, half to himself. "Thinking stuff like that. Letting my brain run away in all directions. It's what got me assigned to the cigarette factory."

"Of course it was," Alorin said. "Of course it was . . ." She closed her eyes, then half-shook her head. "All right," she whispered.

Callion frowned at her, not sure whether to be insulted that Alorin thought he _belonged_ at the cigarette factory. "All right what?"

Alorin opened her eyes again and looked at Callion with a very faint smile.

There was something suddenly different about her, Callion thought. He couldn't say what it was. He couldn't say how he knew. But there was something different about her.  
"Alorin?” he said uncertainly.

Alorin snorted. "Not likely. I'm—"

She was interrupted by a noise in the distance.

Callion had never heard anything quite like it before. It seemed to be coming from the void, a sort of whistling whine. He cocked his head. "What in the Warren—"

Alorin was on her feet so fast that Callion barely saw her move. _"Off the pier!"_

"Wha—"

She grabbed Callion by the collar of his coverall, dragged him four or five steps to the edge of the concrete, and, as Callion was still clutching at his clothes to keep her from choking him, heaved both Callion and herself into the sea.

\----------------

The sea was _cold._

Callion attempted to yell, in startlement and indignation, and found him mouth full of extremely salty (cold) water. It didn't taste like pickles, despite what Alorin had said. The impact (plus the cold) shocked the breath out of him, and he—

Panicked. Absolutely and mindlessly, because the iron hand on his collar was _pushing him down,_ under the water, down into the dark, where he couldn't breathe and couldn't see and couldn't-breathe-couldn't-breathecouldn'tbreathe he needed _air—_ A tiny irrelevant part of him remembered Alorin’s question, the question Callion could never ask: _how deep is the sea?_ And he had a horrible feeling the answer was, _it goes down forever, of course, just like the void goes up—_

There was a flash of orange light above Callion, as if something in the ruined city had briefly caught on fire.

And then Alorin wrenched him back to the surface.

They were very near a concrete post. Callion grabbed onto it, wrapped both arms around it, and breathed in huge gasps. He was shivering. Beside him, Alorin disappeared briefly under water again. There was a confused thrashing, and then she came up holding her shoes. After a moment, she managed to get them knotted together somehow—they had strings, rather than the usual zip-cloth fasteners—and slung around her neck.

A small part of Callion was glad Alorin was here; she seemed unconcerned about being in the water. She seemed to be able to float and sink at will. Another part of Callion wanted to punch her; what, in the name of all that was safe and reliable, had she been _thinking?_ But the largest part was concerned with getting out of the cold cold cold _cold_ water, which, when seen up close, was far less amazing and remarkable and far more likely to slap him in the face if he turned his head wrong, which he just had. He snorted salt out of his nose and glared at Alorin. _"I am going to kill you into little bits!"_

"Oh, there's gratitude for you." Anovar pushed her hair out of her eyes. Wet, it looked even longer and more unruly.

_"Grati—"_

_"Quiet!"_ It was fierce enough to make Callion shut his mouth with a snap. "I miscalculated. That wasn't a bomb. That was a landing capsule. And that means you ought to get underground as soon as you can."

For all the water around him, Callion found his mouth suddenly dry. "Deathdealers?"

"What? Of course not. Callion, pay attention, this is important. Can you swim?"

"Can I what?"

"Swim. S-W-I-M. Maneuver through the water without sinking."

"No, of course not!" Perhaps not of course; Alorin could.

"Then I'll have to pull you." Callion wasn't sure exactly what Alorin did, but she was suddenly within reach. "Arms around my neck, just as if you were playing horsies. Hold on tight, but _don't_ thrash. Panicking puts us both in danger."

"Er." The concrete pillar was very safe and stable. It was, in fact, possibly the most wonderful object Callion had ever clung to in his life. "How deep is the sea?"

"Irrelevant. We won't be swimming down, we'll be swimming across, so stop stalling."

Callion took a very deep breath, then lunged away from the post and grabbed onto Alorin.

Swimming seemed to involve both arms and legs, and it wasn't very comfortable to ride on top of someone who was doing it. Alorin seemed to spend most of the time with her face under water, and Callion wasn't sure how she could go without breathing for as long as she did. But they made steady, even fairly speedy progress towards the edge of the land. That edge was sheer concrete, impossible to climb, but Alorin spotted the ladder set in the concrete wall at almost the same time as Callion did.

Alorin pulled herself up as soon as Callion let go of her to grab onto the metal rails of the ladder. She didn't even care enough to look down and see if Callion was all right.

Callion was too cold and uncomfortable to call her names under his breath, so he just climbed up after her, dripping. The air seemed colder after he'd been immersed, which was absolutely unfair. Callion reached into his pocket, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, and then realized. They were all soaked through. Ruined.

Alorin plucked them out of his hand and threw them over her shoulder. Callion heard them splash into the sea. "Good riddance to bad rubbish. Trust me, Callion: those things are _not_ good for you. Now. Which way to the nearest surface access?"

"H-h-how should I know?" Callion hugged himself. "I only know about one."

"Of course. Because why should it ever be easy?" The strings on her shoes seemed to be giving Alorin a bit of trouble, but she eventually got them unknotted and back on her feet. She pulled that squarish device—the "remote control," whatever that was—out of her pocket, shook it a bit ineffectually to drain the water out, and then thumped and twiddled it until it produced a rather anticlimactic beep.

"What're you doing?" There certainly weren't any fans around here to stop.

"Never you mind." Alorin put it back in her pocket. It must be a fairly large pocket, Callion thought; the remote control was longer and wider than her hand. "Right. We'll just have to use the entrance you know about. Follow me."

Callion followed her.

\----------------

No more than a minute later, Callion heard the first clicking sound.

He stopped where he was. "Did you hear—"

"Callion," Alorin said, "stop dawdling."

"Fine. If we get ripped apart by Deathdealers, all my bits are going to haunt your bits."

Alorin snorted. "Don't be absurd."

"I'll just shut up then," Callion muttered. "Choombly jackrat."

"I heard that. I'm not familiar with the idiom, but I heard it. I suspect the appropriate response, specially formulated to match the maturity and sagacity of the original comment, would be, 'So's your mum.'"

Callion stuck his tongue out at her back.

"Such devastating rhetoric."

Callion had no idea what rhetoric was, but he was fairly sure Alorin was being a choombly jackrat again. He was too irritated to wonder how she could tell when he made faces at her.  
"You know," Alorin said after a moment, when he didn't respond, "your problem—"

"Shhh! I'm sure I heard something."

"Yes, well." She sounded mournful. "That was rather the point of starting an argument with you. So that you wouldn't have to listen to it."

_"What?"_ It came out much too loud. Callion ran forward, nearly tripping on the uneven pavement, and grabbed Alorin’s arm. They were on the edge of an open area, the surface equivalent of a commons, Callion supposed, without as many buildings around. It made him feel far too exposed. "That's totally—completely—how could you even _do_ that? We could be killed—"

Alorin turned and put her hands on Callion’s shoulders. "Callion."

Then Alorin cocked her head, looking faintly alarmed, but Callion was in no mood to care what she was reacting to. He pushed her away. "No! Stop patronizing me, I'm not a child. And even if I was, I wouldn't be as irresponsible as you! Do you even understand what's going on? We. Could. Be. _Killed!_ The Deathdealers will—"

"Shh!" Alorin put her finger over Callion’s lips. "Something's coming."

"Yes," Callion hissed through clenched teeth, "that's what I'm—"

"No. Something else. Not Deathdealers." Alorin turned around. "Probably much more dangerous. Stay. _Here."_

And then she strode out into the middle of the commons and spread her arms, turning this way and that as if she were the host on some sort of show—as if she were in charge of absolutely everything. "Come out, come out, whoever you are!"

Not just crazy. Suicidal. Callion shrank back into the shadows, staring at her.

"Don't be shy!" Alorin was being loud enough to attract Deathdealers from miles around. Callion could swear he heard metallic legs rustling nearby.

He must have been wrong, though. The being that walked into the clearing to face Alorin was was made of metal. But it wasn't a Deathdealer, and it didn't click.

It was shaped like a human. It was shaped like a slender, graceful human, and it glittered silver in the light from the stars. It wasn't horribly wrong like the Deathdealers. In fact, it was precise and delicate and somewhat beautiful, except for one thing. It didn't have a face. Just a smooth expanse, with an inlaid pattern that glinted slightly gold.

"You," it said in a mellifluous voice, "are not a human being."

What?

Alorin paced slowly around it as if she were inspecting a piece of merchandise. She pulled her remote control from his pocket and waved it vaguely it at the metal humanoid. "And _you_ are a drone. There's a telop controlling you from a very comfortable chair, with no need to get their hands dirty. An appealing prospect, no doubt, since you represent the organization which forced Garden's population to live as troglydytes. I wish I could say I was charmed."

Callion had thought she was condescending before. Now, though, there was enough scorn in her voice to drown the whole Warren. Everything about her said, _you are too insignificant to bother getting angry at. Go away, little machine. Go play._

What did the machine mean, she wasn't human? Of course she was human. What else would she be?

"You," the drone said, "are unGuided."

"That has the feel of a euphemism. Not too high in the hierarchy, are we? A true believer, or simply in too precarious a position to speak plainly?" Alorin stopped moving. She had maneuvered the humanoid so it had its back to Callion. Which also meant Callion could see her face.

Callion’s heart was beating fast. Alorin didn't seem frightened at all.

She looked like a human being. She didn't act exactly like one. And, Callion thought, she hadn't corrected the metal being when it said she wasn't.

"Shall we see how much I already know?" Alorin went on, oblivious to the thoughts that were making Callion edge away from the confrontation, one painfully slow step at the time. "Garden didn't suffer a war a century ago. No, I'd say—partial environmental collapse. Engineered ecosystems, never quite as resilient as the itchy, inconvenient, natural sort. And there was a conquest, but not the martial kind. Oh, no. It was closer to a corporate buy-out, and it offered security in a world of collapsing certainties. Yours is the sort of abbatoir that the cattle walk into freely because someone scribbled HOT MEALS on the door. And I understand. I do. If you fear your alternatives are a world ripped asunder and a vista of endless gray, who wouldn't choose the gray? But you—second generation? Third, fourth? Time enough to start thinking for yourself again. And you aren't even suffering under the same enforced handicaps as the people in the warrens."

Warrens? What did she mean, warrens? There was only one, everyone knew that. "You," the metal humanoid said sweetly, "may serve as a link to other unGuided."

"So. An underground civilization down here, designed to grind out any spark of individuality or imagination, and up on Garden's moons and orbitals—what? Eden for the elite, I expect. Fountains and sculptures and fine wines, Versailles reborn. And you, brought up to think of the planet-dwellers as your absolute inferiors, to be controlled for their own good or put down like abandoned animals. Am I right?"

"If you have a technological method of contacting other unGuided," the machine said, still sounding impossibly sweet, "you should use it. Otherwise, you may scream."

A slender, curving blade came out of its arm.

Callion backed into something.

He forgot how to breathe. He'd _backed into something._ Not a wall. Something narrow, something metal—like a long metal leg—

He could barely make his head turn to look. It seemed like everything was moving far too slowly, like a toy with the batteries running down. If he didn't look at it, a childish impulse insisted, it wouldn't be there, it would just be a bad dream, it couldn't hurt him—

He turned her head and saw the Deathdealer. The eyeball on its nearest knee was looking at him.

"And there," Alorin said, "you destroy what limited sympathy I had for you. I have a personal rule about paradises for parasites." She made an expression with teeth in it. _"I burn them._ Go to your superiors, little telop, and give them a message. Tell them to fix things on Garden—starting with the drugged cigarettes—or I will." She patted the drone on what should have been its cheek. "Now run along."

She stalked past the drone, back towards Callion. And pressed a button on her remote control as she did so.

The Deathdealer behind Callion shot the humanoid. So did two others, from different sides of the commons.


	5. 5

Callion made a choked sound and dove forward, away from the Deathdealer.

Alorin moved forward quickly and took his arm to help him to his feet. Callion shook her off and backed away. "The Deathdealers," he stuttered. "You're controlling the _Deathdealers."_

Alorin looked bemused by his shock. "I told you," she said, "that I was going to save you from the things. What, did you think I meant to throw rocks at them? Give me credit for a _little_ finesse."

"But—but you—" He looked past Alorin, at the drone. Which was on the ground, smoking and headless. "You're _controlling the Deathdealers._ And that—it said—"

Alorin killed the drone. She’d just—killed it.

It wasn't a human, but it was sort of human- _like,_ more so than the Deathdealers, and her expression hadn't even changed as she pressed the button.

"Nothing useful," Alorin said, "which says something right there. Most people in that telop's position would be just a touch curious about me—spouting what I'm sure is forbidden history, member of no species mentioned in their records. But our new friend stuck strictly to script. Which means, I suspect, heavy monitoring. Serpents in paradise." She smiled, and it wasn't an encouraging expression at all. "Good."

"It—it said you aren't human."

Alorin gave Callion her your-stupidity-is-as-boundless-as-space look. "I just said," she said, in tones of long-suffering patience, "that I'm not a member of—" She shook his head. "Never mind. Enforced ignorance. Probably almost as frustrating for you as it is for me. I'm—"

"No." Callion shook his head hard. He could feel his heart pounding. The Deathdealers weren't moving, but he could feel their eyes watching him, practically feel their hatred. "You're doing it again, you're just—talking lots of words, without any— _you're not human._ That's true, isn't it? Tell me!"

"Quite true," Alorin said after a moment.

"And you're controlling the Deathdealers." Cold, choking dread. She wasn’t a person at all, she was some sort of monster, and Callion was weak and stupid and far out of his depth. He edged further away from Alorin, braced to run. "You're some sort of—Deathdealer thing, aren't you? If the drone had cut you, there'd be metal."

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm the one being on this planet who doesn't have an assigned role in this sickening dance. The Outside Context Entity, as it were. Didn't you understand a word of what I said earlier? Do you still honestly believe your Deathdealers are alien?"

What? "What?" Callion said dumbly.

"Humans," Alorin said remorselessly, "built the Deathdealers. To keep Garden's population in the warrens, confined and controlled. Think about it; why else would they ask you to identify yourself before opening fire? And why else would they be so precisely designed to match primal human fears? Take it from one who knows: the things which inspired your stories, the beings that actually loathe all life but themselves, wouldn't be the slightest bit terrifying if it weren't for the oozing, _shrieking_ hatred inside."

Callion was still stuck on the first sentence. "That's impossible."

"It's fact. It happened." Alorin kept moving towards him, decreasing the distance between them even as Callion tried to increase it; it made him feel like he was being slowly hunted. "Do you truly believe that people are never monsters and monsters never people? Because if so, you're more painfully naíve than I—"

"It's impossible! _You're lying!"_

He turned and ran, past the fallen body of the drone, past frozen Deathdealers on the edge of the open space and, for all he knew, dozens more unseen.

They didn't shoot him, and that seemed as terrifyingly unnatural as all the rest. He tripped over a piece of broken concrete, on the edge of the commons. "Callion! Wait!" Alorin shouted. "You're running straight for— _listen to me!"_

Callion pushed himself to his feet and kept going.

\-----------------

He had gone several blocks, and was beginning to gasp for air, when a Deathdealer spidered down the side of a building and dropped beside him.

Callion tried to double his pace to a sprint, and failed. The Deathdealer kept pace with a horrifying rustle of metallic legs. _"Identify-self—"_ it whined, and then, _"Ident—id-id-identify—"_

"Stop," Callion panted, "stop _saying_ that!" Why else would they ask? Why else _would_ they ask?

But it couldn't be. The Warren—the Warren was where he lived, it was his home, it couldn't be—the situation that Alorin had described was a nightmare upside-down world, like seeing a friend without their face.

_"Identif—"_ The Deathdealer's voice changed. _"—able muddled piece of machinery—Callion, can you hear me?"_

Callion stumbled to a halt and stared at the Deathdealer. "Alorin?!”

After seeing Alorin control the Deathdealers, perhaps Callion shouldn't be surprised that she could—what? Possess one? It still gave him a nasty jolt. Deathdealers shouldn't talk like people—like people he'd thought were people—

"What? No, of course not. That's not my name. That was never my name."

No, Callion thought, because machines didn't have any.

_"Callion, listen to me. This is important. According to the Deathdealer network, there are troops massing around your Warren entrance. I could talk my way past them, but they'll kill you. You have to come back."_

"Liar," Callion said, edging around the Deathdealer to make sure he could run when he needed to.

He couldn't hear the exasperated sigh through the Deathdealer's voice, but he heard the pause where it should have gone. _"If I meant to hurt you,"_ not-Alorin’s voice said, tinny but still recognizably irritated, _"why in the name of Rassilon's tea cozy would I have bothered saving your life? Twice!_ Think, _boy!”_

"I don't know," Callion said tightly. "How should I know? _You're smarter than I am!"_

_"Hmph. Naturally. The single, solitary time when I'd rather they didn't take that into account—"_ Even through the Deathdealer, that came through quieter, as if she were talking to herself. _"All right. So you aren't going to come back, no matter what I say. Is that it?"_

"Yes," Callion said, and braced himself to sprint.

_"Then you'll just have to negotiate this on your own. Your best bargaining chip is information. Offer the soldiers everything you know about me. Every word, every phrase, every action you can remember, from saving your life to taking your cigarette. And if you have to, tell them I'm a representative of a species that transcends the Shalner Technological Scale and I'll take it as a diplomatic insult if you're damaged in any way. Remember that. Shal-ner Tech-no-logical Scale."_

Callion shook his head, not so much in denial as incomprehension. Whatever Alorin was playing at—Callion had no idea what she was up to.

For a hostile machine-thing, she sounded—

Honestly, she sounded quite a lot like she was telling Callion to squeal on her to save his own skin. That wasn't something a hostile machine-thing would do.

_"And, Callion?"_

"What?"

_"It will be all right. Remember that. Whatever happens next, remember that."_

"Alorin,” Callion said slowly, "if you're not—I mean, if you're really something else, not with the Deathdealers, and the admin—" He swallowed. "I don't think the admin will believe you. Are you sure you want me to tell them things that might get you—I don't know—"

The Deathdealer's voice wasn't suited for it; it took Callion a moment of confusion to realize that the noise it produced was a rather sad chuckle. _"How could you possibly give away anything that could harm me?"_ Alorin said. _"You don't even know who I am."_

The Deathdealer scuttled ahead of her, leading the way. Callion, awash in confusion, frightened, and more than a bit cold, followed.

\----------------

Alorin was right about the soldiers. At least, she was right about them being there.

They made the Deathdealer stop with a—Callion wasn't sure what it was, but it let out a blinding flash and a sound like a whole array of lighting panels exploding. And then they shot him with something that made his legs feel noodle-y and unworkable.

His ID fell out of his pocket when he pitched forward. He also hit his head, badly enough to see red and black sparks. It hurt. It hurt a lot.

One soldier threw him over his shoulder, and they carried him back to a spot where they'd set up lights. Oh, there were other things—machines like thicker, heavier carts, machines with big tubes on them that Callion didn't recognize, all of them rumbling like a factory in full production—but mostly, he noticed the harsh, glaring banks of lights.

The soldier who was holding him put him down. Callion managed to squirm so that he could see somewhat, even though nothing seemed to work quite right. Another soldier came up to the group who had captured him, and Callion found himself looking at his shoes. They were, bizarrely, a bit like Alorin’s: fastened with string. There was no other resemblance, but it was a surreal note in a world that had been getting steadily more surreal.

"Sir?" the soldier who had been carrying Callion said.

"Kill him.” The soldier with the shoes said it in the exact same tone most of people would have said _that's nice_ or _have a nice day._

"Nnn! _Wai!"_ Callion's fear surged. His lips wouldn't work right either, how was he going to tell them to stop if he couldn't even talk— "Wait!" Still muddled, but better. “’Lorin,” he slurred. "I tell you all 'bout ‘Lorin—“

She'd said Callion could.

She'd said Callion should.

Callion shouldn't feel so much like a boy ratting out his best friend, like someone who had just committed an immense betrayal out of fear and stupidity and not knowing what to do. He knew that. But he couldn't help the sinking feeling in his stomach, the inner voice that said, _Callion, what have you done?_ People shouldn't squeal. He'd known that since he could walk. It had never been taught in school, but you learned it from other children or suffered the consequences. Squealing was wrong.

The kill-him soldier knelt by his side. “Lorin,” he repeated.

From there, things got confused.

Callion was loaded into one of the carts, accompanied by two guards and bound hand and foot with the plastic fasteners that enforcement used. Considering that Callion couldn't even stand, that was completely ridiculous, but he didn't attempt to say that. The back of the cart had no windows, so he couldn't see where they were going or interpret the various rumbling, banging noises, or see what all the jostling was from. After a while, he started feeling sick, but he suppressed it as best he could. Both soldiers had a hard, nasty look to them. If he threw up, they would probably be upset. He wasn't sure what they would do to him, but it wouldn't be good.

He was on the verge of vomiting anyway when the cart stopped and the back opened. "We're underground!" Callion said, an involuntary exclamation that made him feel stupid as soon as he'd said it. So, the sinking sensation hadn't been his imagination.

The soldiers ignored him.

They took him into a room, and sat him in a chair, and someone who wasn't wearing medical pink gave him an injection of some sort. And after that, he wasn't entirely sure.

He remembered throwing up. He remembered crying. _Don't,_ he remembered saying, through his tears, _don't ask me any more, it isn't fair. Alorin didn't hurt me, I don't want to squeal, just go away and leave me alone._ He remembered hearing a stupid voice prattling, somewhere in the distance, _a scale. She said the scale was important. Shiller, Shelly, Shal—that's almost it—Shalner!_ Someone asked the boy what ‘she' said about the Shalner scale. _That she did something to it. Transduced? Transcended? Does transcended mean broken? Is she going to get in trouble for breaking it?_

Callion wished the boy would be quiet. He was telling them all about Torris and he _shouldn't,_ they weren't being nice at all. A moment later, he heard the boy say, _shut up, you stupid moldhead,_ but he was too blurry and sick and disoriented to make the connection.

His eyesight was so wavery that he closed his eyes most of the time, but his hearing had become so sharp it was distracting. At one point, he remembered hearing other voices. Somebody said, _a hundred pounds when he was sopping wet, there's no way—_ Someone else said, _so tell me, if he isn't resisting the drugs, why won't he give us the forsaken thing's name?_ And then the questions started up again, and someone was asking her the name of the woman in the multicolored clothes.

_I don't think she has one,_ Callion said, or perhaps just dreamed he said. It was hard to be sure. _Machines don't, you know._ Only he thought she'd answered the question before, and that time, he'd said that it wasn't Peace, that it was something Parli did. 

It went on, and on, and on. After a while, Callion started crying again. _Stop talking,_ he remembered begging, _please stop talking, every time you say something I have to say something back and I'm tired, I just want to stop—_

They didn't stop. Who is she what did she tell you where does she come from what did she tell you how did she make contact what did she do to the Deathdealers is she alone what did she tell you what did she tell you _what did she tell you—_

Callion must have answered some of the questions ten times. More. After a while, he was drearily certain that it was never going to end. He would be in the chair, answering the same questions and closing his eyes so the nausea wouldn't take him, until time ground to a halt and the Warren fell in on itself.

But it didn't. He couldn't remember when it stopped, or how, but it demonstrably must have. He woke up with an unspeakable taste in his (very dry) mouth, a sore throat, a headache like nothing he'd ever known, and a harsh light. And a loud voice saying, "Breakfast!"

\-----------------

Callion sat up, then croaked, _"Ugghh,"_ and covered his eyes. He had what Norrem and Sapell would have called a two-rat hangover: one live rat trying to fight its way out of your skull, one dead rat in your mouth.

He wasn't in his room. This was a tiny chamber, big enough to sit up in but not big enough to stand, only slightly longer than a tall man, with the entire ceiling taken up by one solid lightpanel. There was a toilet at one end, by his head. The hatch by his feet was made of metal, with a panel that was open at the moment. Someone had stuck a tray through. The tray had breakfast on it.

Callion thought breakfast sounded like the single most disgusting thing that could happen. But there was a human being on the other side of the slot. He scooted forward. "Hello? Who is it?" He couldn't see a face, but he saw hands on the other side of the slot, and olive-colored sleeves. A soldier.

"It's my first offense," Callion said.

"You think that matters?" A female voice, probably about eighteen years old, and full of loathing. "After what you did, they're never letting you go. Who'd let you around normal people? No, you're going to be in that tube until they empty you out, and then they'll put a plasm-bolt in you. They're already taking volunteers for the firing squad."

Headache and horrible taste and breakfast and everything else were suddenly side issues. "I don't understand," Callion said, managing to hold his voice steady only by force of will. "What am I supposed to have done? What do you mean, 'empty?' What—"

"The alien gave you something to make you resist questioning," the soldier said.

"You mean Alorin?” Questioning. Blurred memories, people asking things over and over.

So that was HBR-45. The truth drug. On the show Enforcers, it made people happy and giggly. Callion wondered if the show was wrong or if he'd had some sort of one-in-a-million reaction to it.

Had Alorin—or whatever her name really was—given him something? Callion didn't remember anything like that.

"The alien you sold out the Warren to," the soldier said. "And it's too bad for you, too. They say they're going to use 'archaic methods of information gathering.' Do you know what that means?" She didn't wait for an answer. "They've got these clippers. Every time you say something wrong, they take off a toe, _crunch._ And once you're out of toes, they start on the fingers. Once you run out of fingers—you don't want to know what happens then. And that's better than you deserve. They sent you some cigarettes with your breakfast, and a lighter, even, but I took them. I think you should have to sit there in your box, without anything, and think about what's going to happen to you, and _wait."_

The panel slammed shut. There was a very final feel to the sound.

Callion stared at it. His brain, his stupid, useless brain, kept replaying the word _crunch._ Over and over again.

They were really, honestly going to kill him. He was going to die.

Alorin had warned him. He hadn't listened, and now he was going to die.

The soldier thought he deserved to die. In fact, she thought he deserved to have his fingers crunched off. Callion couldn't imagine anyone faking that tone of voice, the dripping, horrified revulsion of it.

Sold out the Warren. But he _hadn't_ led the Deathdealers down into it. And Alorin—

That was a tangle so complicated it made his head pound even more. If Alorin wasn't with the Deathdealers, then admin should be offering her private living quarters, or a gold circulation pass, or whatever you offered someone who said she wasn't human. Alorin could control the Deathdealers. If she could control the Deathdealers, then—well, the possibilities were endless. An army of controlled Deathdealers fighting back the hostile ones, the surface made safe, humans living in the city again—space enough for everyone to have their own LQ, passes to go up and look at the surface lights-out colors—

Unless she was right. Unless everything about the Deathdealers was a lie.

If everything about the Deathdealers was a lie, then Callion couldn't see where the lies _stopped._ It was too big, too dizzying. The very idea frightened him. That was why he'd run from Alorin last night: not just Alorin’s madness, not just her lack of humanity, but the feeling that she'd just ripped the top off the whole Warren. If it were true, Callion's whole world was something distorted and deformed and wrong-way-around.

Despite the fact that he'd talked with Alorin and rolled his eyes at her and started to get to know her, it was almost easier to think that Alorin must be some sort of Deathdealer thing. But if she were a Deathdealer thing, then the soldier was right. Callion was a traitor. Vile. Horrible. Criminal. The only reason Alorin knew about the Warren was that she had followed Callion—

Except that she had been breaking into buildings when Callion first saw her. She probably would have broken into the ventilation building. It wasn't as if it was hard to find. And that fact niggled at Callion as wrong, and he had a feeling that it led right to the heart of the tangle, but he couldn't concentrate on it. All his other worries paled next to the realization that, guilty or innocent, they were going to kill him. They were going to _kill him._ That thought chased itself around and around until Callion wanted to scream.

He was shaking. But he couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t run. He was trapped in here.


	6. 6

Nothing happened, and nothing happened, and nothing happened, and that made it _worse._

After a while, there was a subtle change in Callion's fear. He had enough to be afraid of, certainly—death and maiming and the possibility that he'd endangered absolutely everyone—but after a while, even the cell he was in started to seem distorted. It was _all wrong,_ in a way he couldn't express. It felt like the ceiling was inching a little bit closer every time he glanced at it. Which, of course, he couldn't help doing again and again . . .

Then it was the walls. Was the cell just a little narrower than it had been before? What if the soldier had been right that they were going to hurt him, but wrong on the details? What if the cell was specially designed to close in on him, inch by inch?

He clenched his jaw. If he didn’t, he was going to start saying things—things like _I'll tell you whatever you want, just please, please, don't._ And he wasn't even sure what came after the _don't._

He was supposed to be at the factory. He was supposed to be at the factory, right now, with the familiar, lovely clunking and grinding of the machines and constant motion. He could almost smell the place. And his LQ in the evening, with familiar people around—people who talked about the same things all the time, who wore ordinary coveralls with ordinary factory colors, who watched _Young Life_ every evening and could recite every one of Genellan's catastrophically failed romances. How could he possibly want to climb around on the surface, empty and barren and unpredictable, when he'd been safe where he was?

He wanted to go home. He wanted to be home. He wanted this not to be happening.

Was the room shorter than it had been?

"Stop it," Callion whispered to himself. "You're making yourself crazy, now _stop it."_ His defective, overactive imagination, at work again.

What if they just left him here? Left him boxed up in this horrible, horrible tube, with its harsh eye-burning light and no room even to stand up. How long would it be until he started screaming?

What if going crazy was like growing old? What if he went crazy in here, and because he had nothing to do but sit, that became all he could do—stuck in one place, in one position, trapped, while the soldiers threatened his fingers and his toes and his ears with their clippers, and he couldn't even talk to them?

What if the room really was getting smaller? It seemed like it was getting smaller. And even beyond that, there was something skewed and hideous about it. He didn't belong here. He didn't _belong_ here.

He wanted to be at the factory. He wanted all this to be a bad dream. Even the surface. Even—

The cell's hatch opened.

Callion gasped, and started to scramble towards it, and then froze.

"You see? I told you it would be all right," Alorin said, and held out her hand to Callion. "Let's go."

Callion stared at her and fought—hard—against the urge to scuttle to the very back of his cell, where the minimal toilet was.

He thought it was the colors of Alorin’s clothes that were doing it. The erratic pattern. With normal people—with humans—you could read their job from the color of their coverall. But Alorin’s clothes—multicolored, chaotic—looking at her, trying to figure out what her colors meant, Callion could believe her capable of impossible things, of flying or popping out of nowhere—

Maybe she had popped out of nowhere. The alternative was that she had just broken into a military jail. Without being shot. Or setting off any alarms. That was somewhat impossible, wasn't it? Actually, once you thought about it, that was very impossible.

Maybe it wasn't just her clothes. Maybe it was her. _Alien,_ the soldier had said. What was looking at him through Alorin’s eyes? What if Alorin was as wrong and twisted on the inside as the Deathdealers were on their outsides?

For a moment, Callion could almost feel it. Feel himself being studied and measured by something old and calculating and so different it made his skin crawl.

"Callion," the alien said quietly. "This isn't you. This isn't your fear. You have to try to fight it."

Callion shuddered involuntarily. Alorin tossed a sort of white cup with a string into the cell with him, and he jerked backwards from it.

"That's a gas filter. You need to put it on. It'll protect you from the RVX-90, from what you're feeling right now." Callion shook his head very slightly, and he could hear the frustration in Alorin’s voice before she fought it down. "I need you to trust me, Callion."

Callion shook his head again, more strongly. "I can't," he croaked.

"Yes, you can, and I need you to try. You're brave, you're strong, and you've been fighting this for your entire life. I need you to keep fighting." She caught Callion's gaze with her own. "Callion. Listen to me. I told you once that sometimes I'm wrong. And no more than a second after that, I was. Do you remember?"

Callion kept shaking his head, but he didn't look away. Alorin’s eyes were brown, not uncanny, not cold, and right now, absolutely sincere.

"I told you that if you got into trouble, I would walk away." Her voice was very quiet. "That was wrong. Utterly and completely. And when we first met, when I told you that I was only going to do you one favor—that was wrong too. I never do that. I never walk away. I will never, ever, in my long and convoluted life, look at an ordinary factory boy and decide that he doesn't matter. I always get involved, I always get attached, and I will always, _always,_ try to fix things. I am the Doctor, Callion, and that is whom I intend to remain." It was almost a whisper. "Now, please. Put the gas filter over your nose and mouth."

Callion took a deep breath, then another. They didn't help. Then he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, trying to fight off the feeling of nightmares and abominations closing in on all sides, and lunged for the paper cup thing. Jammed it over his face, and held his breath for a moment before he could bring himself to inhale through it. He had never done it before, he had never seen such a thing before, and something about that mere fact had his mind screaming—

The string, he realized, went over the back of his head to hold the thing on. Just like safety goggles.

Not an incomprehensible object at all. Just sort of safety goggles for the nose.

Ridiculous image. Callion was still shaky and weak and almost teary-eyed from the dread, but something about it made him want to start laughing. He fought it down. It felt hysterical, the sort of laughter you might not be able to stop. He scooted along the floor towards—

Not Alorin. Nor Torris, nor Parli. Despite wanting desperately to be free of this cell—and why hadn’t he been thinking of that a moment ago?—Callion had trouble taking her hand. Some instinct insisted that the stranger wasn't _like_ him, that her touch would freeze or burn. "Is that your name?" he said, and his voice sounded like a stranger's, high-pitched and cracked. "'Doctor?'" What sort of person was just called Doctor?

"Much more important. It's who I am." The Doctor helped him out of the cell, which was on the second row; they were stacked three high, Callion saw as he stepped into the hallway.  
It was a long hallway, entirely lined with heavy metal hatches, most of them opened. And there was an armed guard quite nearby.

Callion drew a sharp breath and stepped back. The guard didn't react at all. He was staring ahead, gaze fixed, not moving.

"Yes," the Doctor said grimly, following his gaze. "Interesting fact. Soldiers aren't supposed to smoke. Some of them actually follow the rules." She took off the most colorful part of her clothing, the bit that hung down in back, and handed it to Callion. "Here. Put this on. It'll make you more of an anomaly."

The cloth weighed more than he would have thought. "Did you," Callion said, looking at the soldier, "do that to him?"

There was a slight pause. "Yes. Put on the coat, Callion."

Callion put it on. It was far looser on him than it was on the Doctor, and the sleeves hung down past his hands.

“We can't count on it taking all of them like that," the Doctor said. "Anyone who smokes regularly is likely to become merely fearful, and fearful soldiers are very free with their plasm-bolts. So stay behind me." She strode down the hall.

Callion trailed after her, still not sure how frightened and disturbed he should be. "How?"

"How did I affect all the soldiers, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Here." She was holding out Callion’s ID. Callion took it. With everything else that had happened, he had completely forgotten he'd lost it. "I must say, it made breaking into the cigarette factory a little easier. I liberated two barrels of RVX-90 and added it to this base's air supply, which fortunately is separate from the civilian ventilation system. Draw your own unpleasant conclusions about law enforcement tactics—" She cut herself off, glancing at Callion. "Or, perhaps, don't. The only history you were ever given was smoke and moonshine, after all."

If only the things the Doctor said weren't so _confusing._ "What's RVX-90? What do cigarettes have to do with anything?"

"Absolutely everything." There was a heavy door at the end of the hall, and the Doctor aimed a small device at its ID reader. There was high-pitched warble, then a click as the door unlocked. "To answer your first question, RVX-90 is not _quite_ a fear drug. It's more subtle than that. It makes it more difficult to cope with the unfamiliar, the unknown. At low dosages, or for anyone who has built up a tolerance, the effect is xenophobia—fear of the strange. And fear of the strange, as you might imagine, creates a corresponding attraction to the familiar, simply because familiar settings provide relief from anxiety. At higher dosages, or for people who haven’t developed a tolerance, human beings become temporarily hyper-routinized. They do what they're accustomed to doing. They can't break out of the pattern. Thus, a guard who is accustomed to patrolling will patrol, but uselessly—incapable of reacting—because prison breaks don't happen every day."

"Like old people," Callion whispered. There was something banging around at the back of his mind, some dire and nasty connection that his brain didn't want to have to make. Why would anybody make that stuff? Why had it been at the cigarette factory?

The times he got frightened of the surface, or the Doctor—how many of those times had he been smoking? _Go to your superiors, little telop, and give them a message. Tell them to fix things on Garden—starting with the drugged cigarettes—or I will._ And, _good riddance to bad rubbish. Trust me, Callion: those things are not good for you._

The Doctor was silent for a moment. "The long-term effects of RVX-90 exposure," she said finally, "include amusica—peculiar, for a drug that reinforces patterns—increased fearfulness, stereotyped speech, repetitive behavior, and eventually, permanent, pathological hyper-routinization. Those behaviors you imagine to be symptoms of old age—have you ever seen them in someone who doesn't smoke?"

"I don't know anybody who doesn't smoke," Callion said faintly. "Except you. You're saying that the—the drug, the RVX-90—it's in . . ."

"In all the cigarettes. Yes."

_"Why?"_

"To control you. To keep you from rebelling against the mind-melting dullness of your lives. And as for why it's in the cigarettes—" They'd come to another door. The same warbling device opened it. "Cigarettes are pleasant, they don't affect work performance the way opiates would, and they're extremely difficult to give up once the habit is acquired. True, they eventually reduce the lungs to cancerous slime and lead to an early grave, but for your administration, that's an acceptable cost. Why contaminate the general air supply, and go to the trouble of issuing gas masks to soldiers and administrators, when they can simply encourage smoking and watch the workers dose themselves?"

"But that's—that's not _right."_

"The word you're looking for," the Doctor said, "is evil. Or vile. Or obscene. And there's worse."

"What?" Could he even stand to hear it?

"I strongly suspect that children of high intelligence, high natural curiosity, or simply an unusual level of defiance, are channeled towards the cigarette factory. In the hopes that overexposure to RVX-90 will destroy their minds more quickly. Make them less of a threat. In other words, some administrator, some bureaucrat whom you have never met and never will, deliberately put you in a place where you would become an automaton by age forty."

Callion opened and closed his mouth wordlessly. He—he just—he couldn't—

"They should have executed you, of course."

Callion stopped where he was, feeling his eyes sting despite himself. "No," he said. "No. I don't deserve that. They could have done something to—I don't know, medicines for the curiosity, or— "

The Doctor stopped and looked back at him, then put her hand on Callion’s shoulder and shook him slightly. "Callion. First, curiosity isn't a mental illness. It's commonly recognized as a sign of intelligence and it's the thing that propelled the human race to the stars. And second, I didn't mean that it would be right to kill you. I meant that they made a grave miscalculation."

Callion looked up at her. The Doctor didn't look like she hated Callion, or thought he needed to be executed. She looked grimly satisfied, like someone watching a person walk into trouble that they richly deserved. "How? What did they do?"

"They thought that by giving you the dullest work they could find, they could numb you into stupidity. Instead, you went looking for something to think about. They thought that making you frightened of the unknown would keep you trapped in a hole. Instead, you learned to press through the fear. They underestimated you, Callion, and you escaped them. You discovered a larger world than they ever wanted you to have, and even more importantly, you found me. And believe me, they are going to be sorry. Now, we're getting close to the air conditioning system, and if anyone has managed to organize a resistance, it'll be there. So follow my lead, do exactly as I tell you to, and keep your head down. And see if you can be quiet for a few minutes, would you? This might be dangerous."

See if _he_ could be quiet for a few minutes? Why, that moldy— _he_ wasn't the one who talked nonstop, whatever they were— "Wait. Are you annoying me to distract me from dangerous stuff? Again?"

Callion saw a flash of guilty startlement cross the Doctor’s face, like a little girl caught stealing extra dessert. She replaced it instantly with a lofty look. "What do you mean, again? The Deathdealers weren't dangerous to us. I just wasn't sure how to explain what I'd done, especially given your irrational attitude towards them."

_"Irrational—"_ She _was._ She was still doing it. "You—"

Which was when the Doctor moved very, very quickly to press Callion back against the wall, and a bright blue plasm-bolt crackled across the hallway ahead of them.

It had come from a partly-open door, perhaps the door to the air conditioning plant. And it made a black, smoking patch on the wall where it hit. Callion felt as if his heart had just tried to escape, slamming itself madly into the side of his chest.

"Stay down," the Doctor murmured. Then she drew herself up and proclaimed, "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"You're not getting past me, alien!" The voice was male, and Callion thought he sounded like an adult. He also seemed nervous. Very nervous.

"Of course I am." The Doctor, in contrast, sounded absolutely assured. Callion wondered for the first time why she hadn't bothered protecting herself from the RVX-90, and then realized it probably had something to do with the whole 'alien' thing. If she wasn't human, who knew what she could do?

Even though Callion was wearing the gas filter, the thought came with a nasty chill. And he couldn't trust that; he couldn't know what he was legitimately scared of and what was just the effect of smoking RVX-90 since he was eleven. Admin, how was he supposed to do this? How could he figure out what to do if he couldn't trust his own feelings and couldn't trust in the rules of the Warren?

"The only question," the Doctor went on, "is whether I'm going around you or through you."

Another bolt struck the wall in roughly the same area. "Try it and I'll fry you," the soldier said tightly.

"Oh, yes. Very intimidating, I'm sure. But you're forgetting something, aren't you?" The Doctor didn't pause long enough to let the man answer. "You said it yourself. _Alien._ How do you know that little toy will even harm me?"

Silence.

"You don't. You don't know anything about me. You cannot possibly imagine what I can do. For all you know, just listening to me could subvert you, make you into my tool. Perhaps I can set you on fire with a good, long stare."

"Shut up."

Callion agreed with the soldier. This particular line of thought was doing bad things to his nerves, too. It was, he told himself, the gas.

"Or perhaps I heal instantly. Perhaps when you shoot at me, I'll just shrug it off. Of course, healing instantly won't mean I don't feel it, so the more you shoot at me, the angrier I'll be by the time I wade through the plasm-bolts. And you don't know how strong I am. You don't know if I can throw you around like a toy, or twist your head off. _You don't know."_

"Shut up!"

"You think you have a nice, strong defensible position there. Did you stop to think that there's no way out besides the ventilation shaft?" The Doctor dropped her voice dramatically. "You're alone in there. Alone and frightened. Don't bother to deny it; I have ways of sensing these things. Do you really think the backup that you called is on its way? And if they arrive, do you honestly believe they'll be on your _side?_ I can do more than control a simple factory boy, you know. An armored riot squad is well within my reach. I'm sure you've noticed your fellow soldiers gone glassy-eyed, or shivering in the corners from naked terror, and as your sargeant might say, I haven't even broken a sweat. Now, do you _want_ to feel the full force of my power, or do you want to throw down your weapon and surrender?"

_"Shut,"_ the soldier said, _"up!"_ And started firing.

This time, he didn't stop at one plasm-bolt. He shot in a frenzy, nonstop. Underneath the crack sounds and the sizzle of burning wall, Callion could hear him shouting at the Doctor to shut up, go away, she'd never get him.

And then the onslaught of fire stopped, and Callion heard the soldier, with the eerie calm of a man at the absolute limit, say, "You'll never take me alive."

The Doctor lunged toward the door. _"No!"_

She bulled inside. There was a _crack._

Callion yelled, _"Doctor!"_ and rushed after her. The soldier—a big, beefy man with unusual brown hair—was pulling the trigger on his rifle, again and again and again, to no effect. When Callion came in, the soldier’s eyes fastened on him, and he cringed away, making a low, indescribable sound in his throat. "Stay back," he croaked. "Get away from me."

"It's the coat, you see," the Doctor said. “The coat clashing with the uniform. At the moment, he can't deal with anything that defies categorization. I suggest you do what he says; no need to tempt him toward more direct violence."

Callion looked at him, and said, _"Admin._ Your shoulder—"

Quite a lot of her shirt was burned away. And her shoulder—it wasn't bleeding, not like the industrial accidents Callion had seen, but that was all you could say for it. It looked—bad.  
And it wasn't closing up instantly. "You _can_ be hurt by plasm-bolts," Callion said accusingly.

"What?" The Doctor focused on him. "Of course I can. Now hand me my remote control."

Her pockets seemed bizarrely deep. Callion pulled out the remote control, then put his hand back in to see how far they went, but the Doctor said, "Callion, you can pilfer my yo-yo collection later. Right now, follow me. And keep up." She sounded annoyed.

Callion followed her through a door, the only other door in the environmental control room. It was covered with warnings, both about CAUTION: LARGE FANS and UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WILL BE SHOT. Beyond it was something a bit like the ventilation shaft Callion was used to climbing up, but with more fans and more vents going off to the sides. There were also two empty barrels of a kind Callion recognized: they said SUPPLEMENT K on the side, and bore the little green leaf that represented cigarettes despite the fact that tobaccomoss didn't have leaves as such. "RVX-90," he whispered to himself.

"Precisely."

Callion wasn't sure how the Doctor had heard him over the thunder of the fans. Even slowing—he thought they were slowing—they were louder than factory machinery.  
"Give me back my coat. It's too large for you; you can't climb in it." Which was reasonable, so Callion pulled out of it and handed it back to the Doctor. She got one sleeve on. Attempting to move the other arm elicited a hiss of pain, and she looped that sleeve around her neck.

"You're really hurt," Callion said. "I thought—I mean, the things you were saying—" Had made him want to run straight back to his cell, but that wasn't the point.

"That," the Doctor said, "was a sophisticated form of psychological warfare that I like to call lying through my teeth."

"Oh."

"You didn't realize?"

"I was sort of—I mean, part of me—what did you call it? Xennerpholia?"

"Xenophobia."

"I _hate_ xenophobia,” Callion said, with passion. "If I stop smoking, do you think it'll go away?"

"I don't think you have a bad case of it in the first place. I was trying to be terrifying."

"You're sort of good at it."

"I don't think I'll choose to be proud of that, but thank you all the same." She turned and strode over to the ladder. "Right. You go first."

"Why me?" Before, she always seemed to grab the lead automatically.

"To minimize the risk that I might fall on you. Hard to do that if you're underneath someone." She sounded more irritable than usual. "You're right. I am, in fact, quite badly hurt. I've flooded my body with endorphins, but it won't last. I need to get back to my TARDIS—my ship, you could say. And there's a remote possibility I might even need assistance to do so." That last sentence came out very stiffly indeed.

"Oh," Callion said, and started climbing. "That means you need my help. Right?"

"You object?"

"What? No! Of course I'll help you. I just—you sort of ask for it funny, that's all."

"Hmph."

Callion didn't want to look down; he'd learned the folly of that the first time he climbed his own ventilation shaft. So he wasn't sure which irritated expression went with that particular snort. "Doctor?"

"Hm?"

"If you can be hurt by plasm-bolts, why did you run into the room?"

"Forty-nine shots," the Doctor said.

"What?"

"He fired forty-nine shots. You weren't counting?" That was, apparently, one of those questions she didn't need or expect an answer for. "A clip holds fifty, you see. And incidentally, I know that not because I'm familiar with that particular make or model of weapon, but through a long, if informal, study of the human psyche. Humans make things in fives and tens, as often as not, and fifty is five tens. I suppose it could have been a hundred, but from his behavior, I calculated high odds that he only had one shot left."

"But you ran in there anyway!"

"He said, 'you'll never take me alive.'"

"What—" Callion stopped.

"He was turning the rifle around when I got there. If I hadn't presented a more satisfactory target, he would have burnt his own brains out. I went too far, you see. Pushed him too hard." The Doctor sounded tired. Callion wasn't sure it was just the strain of climbing with only one working arm. "I used to be good at not hurting humans. Not frightening them. But this time out, I have so much more of an edge to me. Oh, I miss being patient, Callion. I miss it so very much."

"You ran in," Callion said slowly, "because you knew he was going to shoot himself—only you also knew he wouldn't, if he had a chance to shoot at _you._ But—I'm not even sure how you could even have figured all that out—"

"I'm a highly intelligent being. Get used to it."

"But you let him shoot at you. You risked your life."

"I had a plan," the Doctor said indignantly.

"You did?"

"I planned to duck."

\-----------------

The surface was very bright. Callion's eyes watered. He realized he'd never been outside when the sun was this close to the top of the sky.

The Doctor didn't say anything when they got to the top. She just turned in place, then picked a direction and strode forward. "Where are we going?" Callion said, hurrying to catch up.  
"I told you. My TARDIS."

"What's a TARDIS?"

"Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. It's a ship."

"What's a ship?"

"In this case, a conveyance that far outstrips any transportation you could possibly be familiar with. Must you keep _nattering?"_

"You're one to talk," Callion said, stung yet again.

"Actually, yes. I am. I'm skilled at natter, babble, prattle, piffle, poppycock, prevarication, nonsense, bluster, distraction, and many more. And I'm telling you, now—" She tripped on a rock, managed to recover without falling, and kicked it vengefully. "Is not the time." She pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders.

"Are you cold?" Callion couldn't see how she could possibly be chilled out here. The sunlight was actually very hot.

_“Of course I'm cold!"_ She shouted it. Callion jumped. "Neither of us," the Doctor added more quietly, through her teeth, "can afford for me to go into a healing coma. We're not safe here. Therefore, I'm holding it off. Therefore, I am, yes, cold. Satisfied? Can we please save the irrelevant questions for a time when I'm in a fit state to indulge you? Thank you."

Callion would have been insulted by that, too, but he realized belatedly what was going on. The Doctor was in pain. It was making her rude—well, ruder. She really needed a medic, but since there was no way to get one, Callion would just have to help the Doctor make it to her ship. Whatever that was. "I'll go first," Callion said gently. "That way, all you have to do is follow me." Finding her a nice, clear path with a minimum of rubble—perhaps it wasn't much, but it was the best thing Callion could think of at the moment.

The Doctor snorted, but didn't respond. After a few moments with Callion in front, she said, "It's blue. You can't miss it."

"Your TARDIS?"

"No, my pet rock. Of course my TARDIS!"

"I was just asking," Callion said.

The Doctor didn't say something scathing and seize the last word. Callion looked over his shoulder, concerned. She was standing with her head down, eyes half-closed.

"Just follow me," Callion said. "Just follow me . . ."

It got harder.

It was too hot. That was the biggest problem, for Callion, anyway. Judging by the way she shivered occasionally and adjusted her coat, the Doctor was having the opposite problem. But Callion was roasting. And he had to keep squinting, too, which eventually made his entire face hurt. He was starting to feel a bit ill; he wasn't quite sure why. Plasm-burns weren't contagious, after all.

Well, not for humans.

And the Doctor was doing worse. One time, going over a bit of rough ground that Callion couldn't figure out how to avoid, she tripped and didn't manage to catch herself and landed on her hands and knees, and the noise she made—wasn't a scream, and it was too short to be a moan, but it was still clearly a sound of pain. Callion tried to help her up, but she growled at him to stop being useless and wobbled to her feet on her own.

So Callion kept going. He felt like he should call a rest stop, for the Doctor’s sake if not for his, but it wouldn't help with burns. This TARDIS could help her, thus Callion had to get her there.

He was getting very thirsty.

He tried shielding his eyes with his hands for a while, and it helped a bit. But it was tiring to walk like that, so he eventually gave up and went back to squinting, seeing the surface world blurred through his eyelashes. He'd never been outside when it was this hot. Was this normal behavior for a sun? Was it malfunctioning somehow? Was that even possible?

The Doctor plodded along behind him. It was the closest to compliant that Callion had ever seen her. And it was definitely the longest he'd heard her go without talking.

Callion’s face was hurting. Not as if he'd squinted too long, or strained his eyes; no, this felt more like some sort of caustic chemical burn. Or, at least, what he imagined a chemical burn to feel like; the cigarette factory didn't have anything to do with acid, thank admin. Either plasm-burns were somehow contagious, for whatever the Doctor was, or he'd gotten something on himself—he needed the emergency shower, or perhaps the first-aid kit—

There wasn't one. So he kept walking.

Eventually, he was moving with her head down almost as much as the Doctor was, looking up only to make sure they were still going in the direction they'd set out—and he wasn't as sure of that as he should have been. He almost walked into the blue box before he noticed it.

It was considerably smaller than he'd expected. He'd been picturing a sort of train. This was—well, it reminded him vaguely of a ticket booth, only without a window.

The Doctor brushed past him, did something with a small tool of some sort, opened the door, and slipped inside.

Callion was ready to settle in and wait his turn. But a moment later, the Doctor poked her head out and said, "Well, come on in, then."

The two of them would _barely_ fit, he supposed. Callion went into the booth.

And said, _"Nnrrgg."_ And backed out again, step by careful step.

It—wasn't. It didn't—couldn't—there was no way, it was just standing there, not leading to anything, it wasn't like opening a door in the Warren where you didn't have any way to guess the size of the room behind it, this was the surface, you could see the outsides of everything, and _outsides didn't work that way._

Impossible things. The Doctor could do impossible things. Whatever she was.

Callion took a deep breath. Then another, and another. His heart was still racing, he could feel dread at the bottom of his stomach, but—but. "Xenophobia," he whispered, "is not my boss. You get that? It's _not."_

And he pulled the door wide open and skidded inside and pulled it closed behind himself before he could change his mind.


	7. 7

"This way," the Doctor said. Callion followed, feeling very much as if he were in a dream. Or a nightmare. He wished he knew which.

This way led to another room—admin, there was more of this place. Callion followed the Doctor inside just in time to see her do something else impossible. She snapped her fingers, and suddenly her hand was filled with tiny lights. It was what it might look like, Callion thought, if dust glowed silvery.

The Doctor gazed at them for a moment, then made a vague sort of throwing motion. They all surged up towards her shoulder and disappeared.

She looked up at Callion, blinked, and snapped her fingers again. This time, the lights were golden, and this time her throwing motion sent them surging towards Callion. Callion tried to dodge automatically. To no avail—the specks were too fast for him—

They reached his face and—disappeared. Somehow.

"What—"

"Sit down." The Doctor nodded toward a sort of couch thing. "I'll get you something to drink."

"Liquor?" Callion said hopefully. At the moment, he'd drink it straight if it would calm his nerves to a mild jangle.

The Doctor gave him a look. "At your age? It would stunt your growth." She eyed Callion. "Or, possibly, already has." She opened a cabinet, although Callion couldn't see exactly how; it didn't seem to have proper handles. "No. You need two cups of this." _This_ came in a clear bottle. "It'll replace the nutrients the nanites are using to repair your skin. Is your face feeling any better?"

Callion raised one hand, almost involuntarily, toward his cheek. "Yes!" It _was._ The sparks had done something.

"Good. Any time you go outside when the sun is high—say, between approximately nine and eighteen, on your clock—you'll want to wear some of this." This time, it was an orange bottle, with what appeared to be a picture of the sun going down. "And I'll find you some sunglasses later."

Callion took the clear bottle from the Doctor dutifully. "I don't—"

He stopped.

The burn on the Doctor’s shoulder was—less. Less horrible-looking. Not as deep a gouge.

"I told you," the Doctor said, "that I would be fine if I could get to the TARDIS."

"How—this place—" Callion wasn't sure how to condense it into a hundred questions, let alone one. "How?"

The Doctor smiled slightly. "How is it bigger on the inside, you mean? Or how can tiny bits of light heal wounds? Believe me, Callion, you haven't begun to see what the TARDIS can do." She sat down on a couch across from Callion. "Are you frightened?"

"Yeah." It came out sounding small. Buriand would laugh at him, seeing him so timid, Callion thought. Of course, if Buriand ever saw the TARDIS, he would probably run screaming himself. Xenophobia.

"Don't be. Nothing in here will hurt you. I won't hurt you."

"What—" It still sounded too small. "You already said you aren't human. So what—" He stopped again. "I don't know how to ask that question without being rude."

"Obviously I put great stock in politeness, myself."

Callion blinked, and looked at the Doctor more closely. There was a definite twinkle in her eyes. Callion smiled back, somewhat uncertainly.

"I'm a Time Lady.”

"What does that mean?"

"In many ways, you already know. I'm highly intelligent. I've forgotten more about technology than most humans will ever know. I've forgotten more about temporal mechanics than the human race will ever know. And, of course, I'm incredibly beautiful, well-dressed, and modest." She grinned as Callion stuck her tongue out at her, then sobered. "Also, I'm older than I look. Which you might have deduced from my conversation as well. Other than that—" She shrugged. "Our species are different, certainly. But not that alien to each other. Not so much that I haven't traveled with humans before, or had human friends. And friends from other species too, of course. You'll discover, Callion, that people from wildly different planets often find that they have a lot in common, once they get past niggling details like having a different set of genders or being bright purple. Now, I expect you haven't eaten today."

Callion abruptly realized he was ravenous.

"No, I thought not. And we both have nanites in us, which makes it even more crucial that we manage a meal or three. Right, then; let's see if the kitchen is where I left it."

The ailment that had been making his face and head hurt, the Doctor explained over lunch, was called sunburn. And as someone with what she called Nocturnal heritage, Callion was extremely susceptible to it. The orange bottle was full of a sort of cream that would make it less likely to happen, but he might also want to look into a broad-brimmed hat. Which was a sort of head clothing, and the Doctor would find one for Callion later, along with sunglasses.

\----------------

Lunch was a revelation for Callion.

He'd always thought there was a decent variety of food in the Warren. Breakfast, for instance, came in three different flavors (plain, apple, and honey). With sandwiches, the ceiling was the limit, really; you assembled them yourself, you could put on three cheeses and five sheets of lettuce if you wanted. There were three flavors of milk (plain, chocolate, and strawberry) and six flavors of juice. And there were all sorts of hotmeals, from spaghetti to spinach (which was greyish and generally disliked), and different kinds of desert, and even nine or ten flavors for nutritional supplement lozenges.

And none of it resembled the stuff in the Doctor's kitchen.

The Doctor tossed out a number of suggestions at her usual brisk pace. Callion recognized less than half of them. He grimaced when the Doctor said oranges, though, and the Doctor raised her eyebrows. "Something wrong?"

"Oh, no—no, it's just a silly thing, honestly." The eyebrows didn't go down. "When I was little, it always bothered me that all the other flavors had their own special name, but orange nutri-lozenges were just called orange. I think I felt sorry for them for being left out—I was only four or so. I remember asking my dorm-father why it was, once, and then half the dorm made fun of me for asking stupid questions."

"How is that a stupid question? Your dorm-father probably just made fun of you because he didn't know the answer." Callion opened his mouth to tell her it hadn't been his dorm-father doing the actual teasing—he'd just rolled his eyes and sighed—but the Doctor didn't give him a chance. "For the record,”she said, talking over her shoulder as she turned to rummage in what looked like a sort of cooler, "although languages seem largely static to human beings, they do change over time, borrowing words from other languages as necessity demands. Color words are often adapted from common or easily recognizable items that have the same hue. 'Pink,' for instance, was originally a flower. And this," she produced a slightly nobbly orange ball, "was called a nãrang in Persia, but by the time the word meandered through all of Arabia and half of Europe to fetch up in France, its syllables were a trifle tattered and frayed. When the English got around to appropriating it, the word was ‘orange.’ First the fruit. Then the color. I'll peel one for you."

The orange smelled overpoweringly good when peeled. Callion wasn't used to cold food smelling like anything at all. It separated into funny little wedges. Callion took a cautious bite of one, was startled by the juice, and then nearly spit it out; there was _too much taste._ He'd never tasted anything that intense before—it made his eyes water—

"Possibly," the Doctor said, watching him, "best to stay away from anything too adventurous today. How do toasted cheese sandwiches sound?"

"Nice," Callion croaked.

By the end of lunch, he had discovered quite a few things.

Cheese on the TARDIS was whiter and had a sharper taste than the Warren kind, which came in orange squares. Callion didn't like it much.

The bread had a grainier texture, which he wasn't sure he liked either—but on the other hand, it didn't disintigrate under stress like Warren bread.

TARDIS tomatoes were cut from another ball-shaped thing, this one smooth, and they looked like wheels. They were good on cheese sandwiches, although they didn't taste much like the sort of tomato that got squeezed out of a tube.

TARDIS bananas actually tasted a lot better than banana-flavored things in the Warren. They looked completely ridiculous, though.

The orange was enjoyable, if Callion took it slowly and cautiously. The best technique, he decided, was to peel off a very small section with his teeth, leaving the pips intact, and then squish it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue. It still didn't taste anything like orange flavoring.

TARDIS chocolate pudding, which the Doctor called chocolate custard, didn't come in little cups but in a big bowl, "left over from last night," the Doctor said. And it was quite possibly the _best substance in the universe._ Callion had seconds. The Doctor had thirds.

Callion felt much better after lunch. He had an uncomfortable moment when he automatically reached into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes, and then realized he didn't have any, and then remembered why he didn't want one—except he did, he wanted one very badly. "That," the Doctor said, "is going to take quite a while to wear off, I'm afraid."

Callion nodded.

The Doctor leaned back in her chair. They were still in the kitchen, and Callion couldn't stop looking around it. Compared to any LQ kitchen, it was huge, and filled with a vast amount of unfamiliar stuff. It was also warm and welcoming; perhaps it was the light, more orangey than the first room he'd walked into. None of the lights in here were flickery or bubbly, the way Warren lights sometimes got. Callion wondered who did maintenance for the TARDIS.

"It's time," the Doctor said, "to talk strategy. Or, more specifically, to talk about you. You can't go back to your warren."

Which he'd known, but it was still intimidating to hear it out loud. "No," Callion agreed. "They'd arrest me. And then execute me, when they were done questioning me about you. I think—I'm pretty sure they asked a bunch of questions last night, but I don't remember all of it. I think they must have used HBR-45, but it wasn't—I don't know, it wasn't silly and wacky, the way it is on Enforcers. It was more like a bad dream." He looked away. "I probably told them everything. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."

"You have nothing to be sorry for. I did tell you to buy your way with information. Remember?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"No buts. If you want to blame someone, blame me. I knew they would very likely use chemical interrogation, and I let you walk into it anyway."

Callion looked back at the Doctor, startled. The Doctor looked pensive.

"I also knew," the Doctor went on, "that whatever information you could give them would be confused and contradictory enough that they wouldn't be willing to simply execute you before I could break you out again. Which, by the way, I was already planning, even as you were taken. I was hoping that they wouldn't be inefficient enough to attempt more medieval questioning techniques. And I allowed all of this to occur because letting you see the viciousness of your own society seemed the most honest way to free you from the mental traps you've been put in. It would have been safer to capture you using the Deathdealer I used to speak to you, lock you away somewhere safe, and only bring you back when the situation was resolved, but—" She sighed. "Making other peoples' decisions for them. I've always had a weakness for it; logical enough, considering how far my problem-solving capabilities outstrip my usual associates. Unlikely that I can escape the tendency entirely, but I should at least prefer to avoid outright kidnapping. I do try to learn from my mistakes.”

Callion thought about this for a moment. "The soldiers," he said, "or the people who questioned me—they might have been admin, I don't know—I think they were afraid of you."  
"I meant them to be. That's what my mention of the Shalner Technological Scale was supposed to ensure."

"What is it?"

"A measure of how much a culture knows, roughly speaking. Level One, for instance, means that tools are only made and used with the muscle power of the creatures responsible for them. Your basic spear, made and thrown by hand; that's Level One technology. Level Two adds routine use of animal power, and so on. The problem is, the scale is a human invention and doesn't go far enough. It has a number for beings that build shells around their stars to make use of all that energy, but there is no catagory for a culture that can adjust the laws of physics, rendering questions of sufficient energy at least partially irrelevant. Or, to put it in a more militaristic sense, my planet is so far beyond this one that a war between the two wouldn't even be possible. We would win and you would lose, probably without any of your weapons being deployed. That colonialism is one of the few societal sins that the Time Lord civilization assiduously avoids—well. To a certain sort of military mind, such facts are merest distractions."

Callion nodded. He was sure that speech was full of information if he could only understand all of it, but it didn't tell him what he really wanted to know. "What I mean is, they were talking like—like me talking to you was the same as talking to an enemy. Like you wanted to destroy the Warren or something."

"Not 'want to,'" the Doctor said mildly. "Nor 'attempt to.' I will destroy the Warren."

Callion's heart skipped a beat.

"Not the people in it," the Doctor added. "I'll do it without hurting anyone at all, if I have a choice. But the system? Dorms and schools designed to crush children into dull and lifeless product, mindkilling drugs to make the human material more malleable, everything that isn't forbidden made mandatory, and Deathdealers to slaughter anyone who escapes long enough to see the sun? Oh, yes. _That ends."_

It was, Callion told himself, nothing but xenophobia. It wasn't him, it wasn't _his,_ it belonged to the stupid cigarettes, and it could breaking well stop trying to choke him at inopportune moments. The Doctor's tone of voice hadn't been _that_ terrifying.

Really. It hadn't been.

"In fact," the Doctor continued, quite casually, "I planned to ask if you wanted to help."

"Help—what, _destroy the Warren?"_ Callion stood up so suddenly he almost knocked over his chair. "I could never—all the people—"

"All the people," the Doctor said, "who are currently smoking poisoned cigarettes."

Callion stopped mid-protest.

"All the people who never got a chance to choose—anything. Where they work. Whether they ever know their own children. I don't plan to go to war, Callion. The word for what I'm doing is _revolution._ And a revolution is worth less than nothing if it doesn't make things better for ordinary people in factories. Do you want to help me try to fix things for them?"

"I don't know," Callion said slowly. "I—want to get rid of the RVX-90. Definitely. But I don't—I really don't think I could hurt anyone."

"I know perfectly well you can't. Why do you think I want you along?" The Doctor rose to her feet. "There's plenty of time to think about it. In fact, you'll probably want a decent night's sleep before you decide anything; humans are like that, I've found. I'll find you a room, then take us into the Vortex before someone tries dropping anything antisocial on us."

Callion was about to protest that it was barely after lunchtime, but then he realized that he was tired. Hiking across the surface, getting sunburned—and probably not getting a good night's sleep before, thanks to the truth drug—

"Okay," he said. "That sounds good."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all I have of the story so far, and I don't know if I'm going to finish it, or in what form. The original plan was to move the action to one of Garden's moons, where Callion and the Doctor would meet the people in charge, Callion would fall in love with the son of the leader (who was a daughter in the version where Callion was female), and the three of them would end up leading a rebellion against the administration and taking over the computer systems that helped run it all. The Doctor would depart to parts unknown, ready to be a Doctor again, and Callion and his love interest would take up the task of rebuilding Garden.
> 
> I may come back to the story someday. It depends on whether I can think of something compelling to do with it. As it is right now, it's an interesting experiment, but an imperfect one. I'm intrigued to find out what people think.


End file.
